LEE KRAMER'S ROOM: With Views

[janice shell]

“Can you imagine if we could just, like, pop up our Founding Fathers right here?” he asked his audience in Tampa. “Can you imagine telling Benjamin Franklin this?”

The conversation would go something like this, Ochsenbein told the students: “So it turns out we can’t travel freely. We have to get forced injections by the government. Our president has been banned from social media, the town square now, okay? Do you know what he would do if we told him those things? He would pick up the emergency release Constitution.”

Oh, for God's sake. Ben Franklin was interested in a great many things, including medicine:

His writings ranged over a number of topics, from treatment of the common cold to promotion of exercise and a moderate diet. With his connections to prominent physicians on both sides of the Atlantic and with his published works widely read, Franklin's thoughts on health and medicine found a broad contemporary audience. He was also a medical activist and inventor, championing smallpox inoculation, taking a leading role in founding Pennsylvania Hospital (the first such institution in the British North American colonies), and inventing devices like bifocal glasses.

...Many of Franklin's medical writings showed the same spirit of public activism that characterized his civic and national projects. He repeatedly used his skills with pen and press in support of innovations that could make a difference in the public health. Most significant, perhaps, was his lifelong endorsement of smallpox inoculation.

Inoculation spread rapidly in North America and Europe after its introduction into western medicine in the 1720s. The practice involved exposing healthy individuals to the disease by abrading the skin and introducing a small amount of morbid matter. Typically the patient would contract a similarly mild instance of the disease and, once recovered, would have permanent immunity. Cases contracted the natural way would often leave victims disfigured and had a significant mortality rate.

Franklin wrote articles promoting inoculation and its safety as early as 1731. His support of inoculation grew after the heartbreaking loss of his 6-year-old son, Francis Folger Franklin, to smallpox in 1736. Franklin had planned to inoculate the boy at the time of an outbreak, but was unable to do so because the child was in a weakened state from another illness. Critics of inoculation suggested that Franklin's son had been a victim of the procedure, and Franklin was forced to publish an article in his paper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, insisting that his son had contracted a natural case of the disease.5

Throughout his life, Franklin monitored the success of inoculation in several colonial cities, and shared information with his correspondents about the procedure's extremely low mortality rates and the decreased smallpox incidence that resulted.6 The statistics he compiled were useful for Some Account of the Success of Inoculation for the Small-pox in England and America (Figure 2), a pamphlet he wrote with physician William Heberden. While in London, Franklin encouraged Heberden to write briefly on the value of inoculation and to include instructions by which any educated layman could inoculate his own family. Franklin wrote the preface and had 1500 copies printed and sent to the colonies for free distribution.

So I think he'd have been one of the first in line to get a COVID vaccine. And he'd have advised others to do the same.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299336/