General Welfare

Preamble of the Constitution of the United States:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

You can’t “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare” with an epidemic raging through your population.

Our first President knew that before the country actually existed: George Washington and the First Mass Military Inoculation

On the 6th of January 1777, George Washington wrote to Dr. William Shippen Jr., ordering him to inoculate all of the forces that came through Philadelphia. He explained that: “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army . . . we should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy.” The urgency was real. Troops were scarce and encampments had turned into nomadic hospitals of festering disease, deterring further recruitment. Both Benedict Arnold and Benjamin Franklin, after surveying the havoc wreaked by Variola in the Canadian campaign, expressed fears that the virus would be the army’s ultimate downfall. ¹(Fenn 2001, 69)

¹Fenn, Elizabeth. Pox Americana: the Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. 370 p.

Vaccine mandates have been challenged before: Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905):

Justice John Marshall Harlan delivered the decision for a 7–2 majority that the Massachusetts law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.[2] The Court held that “in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand” and that “[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”

Shapiro at First Draft with The man who lived by the river and I with In other words use the old joke to highlight the concept:

God works in mysterious ways,
His wonders to perform.

William Cowper’s poem “Light Shining out of Darkness”

Speaking of which Leviticus 13:45 recommends wearing masks and social distancing for disease control.

If you don’t want to take the minimal measures required of a citizen, hie thee to the wilderness and let the society return to normal. You are getting people killed and spreading disease so you won’t be “inconvenienced”.