The act allocated about $17,000 (almost half a million dollars by today's standards) for the vaccination of Native Americans living near white settlements. The Indian Vaccination Act was passed by Congress at the request of Lewis Cass.
A further dive into the history of Native Americans and their interactions with the government of the United States - and how smallpox keeps popping up in their interactions - shows how vaccines can be used as both weapons and rewards when politics and racism are added to the equation. We also mentioned in passing the where she talks about how the was used not to benefit Native Americans but to drive them out of their lands and into reservations by the Andrew Jackson administration. In our last blog post, we talked about how President Donald Trump.
