Oh for goodness sake. You sound like Milwaukee in 1894.
http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/pages/events/peoplesrole/leavitt/leavitt_trans.html
Public resistance or cooperation?
Historical experiences with smallpox
Judith W. Leavitt, PhD
This was an outbreak that came to the City of Milwaukee hitting every ward in the city by June of 1894, at the same time as a brand new health commissioner, Walter Kempster, had taken office. Now Kempster was someone who did not believe in political patronage for the health department, and refused to give jobs to the people in his own political party, so he started off immediately on the wrong political foot. Everybody was mad at him, and then on top of that, Smallpox comes. Well, he treated it in the same way as previous health officers had. He started a vaccination campaign. He used the isolation hospital, and he used home quarantines.
Now it happened that he used home quarantines for the most part in the middle or upper class parts of the city because he felt that people could be isolated in home there more effectively; whereas, in the poor immigrant sections of the city, he used forcible removal to the isolation hospital. And you can imagine that discrimination there was not helping, so the Smallpox, as I said, spread city-wide. It began concentrating in the immigrant wards, and health department activity concentrated there also. This is just to show you what home placarding looked like in a case of Mumps, but take a look at the uniforms. The uniforms of the health officers became an issue also. So there was enormous resistance, and it focused mostly in the immigrant wards where the Smallpox itself focused.
Part of the resistance to health department activities in 1894 were specific to Kempster; that is, he was a very unpopular man right from the start. We're in the middle of an economic depression in 1894, and he was not giving people jobs who thought they deserved them politically.
Another big part of the resistance came from the anti-vaccinationists. This was an organized movement at the end of the 19th Century to prevent people from getting vaccinated. Now these are people who thought vaccination was a dangerous procedure. It was centered in immigrant wards, but it was certainly not exclusive to immigrant wards. And the physicians in the city were split probably one-third/two-thirds. One-third against vaccination, two-thirds for it. There was significant, as that tells you, significant medical disagreement, so anyone who turned to a medical authority would have gotten various and mixed messages.
There was great immigrant fear of government authority, in general. Government authority that came knocking on your door in a uniform in specific, especially when it was trying to take your child to the isolation hospital against your will, and so that was a big focus for the problem.
There was a perception, I think there was also a fact of injustice in the way that government policy was handled; that is, the rich were allowed to stay home and be quarantined, the poor were taken to the hospital. There was this phrase, "The scum of Milwaukee" in the newspapers quite a bit, and the people who lived on the southside of Milwaukee felt that that's the way the rest of the city viewed them, as the "scum of Milwaukee" and, therefore, it didn't matter what you did to them, so there was definite unequal application of the policy. And the immigrants responded by not reporting cases of Smallpox, by hiding them when people came to the door. And ultimately, by rioting against forcible removal, and against vaccination.
The riots in Milwaukee were characterized this way, women played a large role in them. Mobs of Pomeranian and Polish women armed with baseball bats, potato mashers, clubs, bet slats, salt and pepper and butcher knives lay in wait all day for the isolation hospital van. The van was, of course, drawn by horses in 1894, and they also had some scolding water to throw on the horses. The riots lasted about a month, and were depicted nationally, as you saw in this case. And the Health Department responded in a very dismissive, inflexible and incentive way, and these are quotations from the Health Commissioner, from Walter Kempster. "But for politics and bad beer, the matter would never have been heard of." He dismissed the whole thing.
"I am here to enforce the laws, and I shall enforce them, if I have to break heads to do it." And, of course, it's the break heads that people heard. "The question of the inhumanity of the laws I have nothing to do with."
Well, I don't have time to tell you the whole story, but Kempster goes on to get impeached, thrown out of office, and ultimately after a year reinstated, but in the process of that impeachment, the Health Department lost a lot of the authority it had gained over the whole of the 19th Century, including the authority to remove anybody to an isolation hospital. And Milwaukee took at least the next 25, 30 years to recover some of those powers.