Apostle Brigham Young Jr. writes that the proposal to provide Utah's school children with smallpox vaccinations is "Gentile doctors trying to force Babylon into the people and some of them are willing to disease the blood of our children if they can do so, and they think they are doing God's service." The Presiding Bishopric counselor had written on 9 Dec. 1900: "Small pox is spreading most all over the State," yet on 21 Feb. 1901 Utah's legislature overrides the governor's veto and passes a law ending compulsory vaccination of school children. In June 1904 Apostle Abraham Owen Woodruff and his first wife Helen die of smallpox, after declining the counsel of LDS president Joseph F. Smith to be vaccinated before the young couple goes to Mexico City.
[Source: The Mormon Hierarchy - Extensions of Power by D. Michael Quinn, [New Mormon History database (http://bit.ly/NMHdatabase)]]
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