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SMALL-POX HAS NOT BEEN MITIGATED BY VACCINATION.
It is often asserted that, although vaccination is not a complete protection against Small-pox, yet it diminishes the severity of the disease, and renders it less dangerous to those who take it (Ha! I've heard that one before). This assertion is sufficiently answered by the proof above given, that it has not diminished Small-pox mortality; but more direct evidence can be adduced.
The best available records show that, the proportion of deaths to Small-pox cases is the same now, although a large majority of the population are vaccinated, as it was a century ago before vaccination was discovered. DR. JURIN, in 1723; the London Small-pox Hospital Reports, 1746-63; DR. LAMBERT, 1763 ; and REES’ Cyclopedia, 1779; give numbers varying from 165 to 253 as the per-centage of mortality among Small-pox patients in hospitals ; — the average of the whole being I8.8 percent.
Now for the epoch of vaccination. MR. MARSON, 1836-51, and the Reports of the London, Homerton, Deptford, Fulham, and Dublin Small-pox Hospitals, between 1870 and 1880, give numbers varying from 14.26 to 2I.7 as the deaths per cent. of Small-pox patients, the average being 18.5. And this, be it remembered, under the improved treatment and hygiene of the nineteenth as compared with the eighteenth century.
These figures not only demonstrate the falsehood of the oft-repeated assertion that vaccination mitigates Small-pox, but they go far to prove the very opposite—that the disease has been rendered more intractable by it; or how can we account for the mortality among Small-pox patients being almost exactly the same now as a century ago, notwithstanding the great advance of medical science and the improvements in hospitals and hospital treatment?
Vaccination is quite powerless either to prevent or to mitigate Small-pox. But this is not all, for there are good grounds for believing that it is itself the cause of much disease and serious mortality. It was long denied by medical men that syphilis can be communicated by vaccination; but this is now universally admitted, and no less than 478 cases of vaccine-syphilis have already been recorded.
We here see a constant increase in the mortality from each of these diseases, an increase which in the sum of them is steady and continuous. It is true, we have not, and cannot have, direct proof that vaccination is the sole cause of this increase, but we have good reason to believe that it is the chief cause. In the first place it is a vera causa, since it directly inoculates infants and adults, on an enormous scale, with whatever blood-disease may exist unsuspected in the system of the infants from whom the vaccine virus is taken. In the next place, no other adequate cause has been adduced for the, remarkably continuous increase of these special diseases, which the spread of sanitation, of cleanliness, and of advanced medical knowledge, should have rendered both less frequent and less fatal.
The increased deaths from these five causes, from 1855 to 1880, exceed the total deaths from Small-pox during the same period! So that even if the latter disease had been totally abolished by vaccination, the general mortality would have been increased, and there is much reason to believe that the increase may have been caused by vaccination itself.
by Alfred R. Wallace, LL.D.
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What, again, could more completely illustrate the irony of the present phase of the controversy, than the fact that both the hon. secretary of the Vaccination League (Mrs. Dr. Garrett-Anderson) and the now deceased hon. secretary of the Jenner Society (the late Dr. Francis T. Bond, of Gloucester,) have declared primary infantile vaccination alone to be not only unnecessary, but practically useless? Referring to the Act of 1898, and the increased infantile vaccination which it secured, they say that this:
"has not prevented the occurrence of a large and increasing number of outbreaks of small-pox, 11 chiefly among adults who have not been revaccinated. There were, for instance, recently, in eighteen months, no fewer than 480 separate outbreaks of small-pox in the United Kingdom, every one of which occasioned great expenditure of public money and considerable suffering. .. There is a growing opinion that, in consequence of altered social conditions and improved sanitary administration, it is not absolutely necessary to have infants of a few months old vaccinated, except in the presence of epidemic small-pox." (See letter in the "Times," 25th April, 1906.)
...The experience of the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1871-73, when many thousands of vaccinated persons contracted the disease, and several hundreds died as the result of the alleged "protection" (!) having lamentably failed in its hour of trial, produced in the minds of the thinking people of Leicester pronounced hostility against the blood-polluting quackery, which was found to be more baneful in its ultimate results than the disease it was supposed to prevent.
THE fact that with less vaccination the town enjoyed better health, and the coincident decline of vaccination and small-pox, had great effect on the minds of the people of Leicester. Not small-pox alone, but the infantile death-rate, the whole, of the zymotic diseases, and the general death-rate, all declined in a very marked degree, as vaccination was discarded, and as the tables and diagrams submitted to the Royal Commission and reproduced here indisputably prove. Thus, from being branded by the Registrar-General in his Annual Reports as one of the most unhealthy of England's large towns, Leicester—by no means advantageously situated geographically, and seriously handicapped by the large proportion of the artisan classes amongst its population—has become the healthiest of the principal manufacturing centres (even competing closely and successfully with health resorts), thanks to well-considered, efficient, and properly executed sanitary measures, combined with the virtual cessation of vaccination.
From the outset, anti-vaccinators realised that Sanitation (in its broadest acceptation), and that alone, was capable of transforming the existing plague spots into healthy areas. They never ceased to press that view on the local authorities, both in season and out of season, but it took a long time to make an impression. Of late years, however, right nobly have the accountable authorities responded.
J.T. Biggs 1912 Sanitation verses Vaccination
