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VACCINATION A DELUSION
Its Penal Enforcement a Crime
PROVED BY THE OFFICIAL EVIDENCE IN THE REPORTS
OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION
By
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
LL.D. DUBL., D.C.L. OXON., F.R.S., ETC.
London
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LIMD.
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1898 This Essay has been written for the purpose of influencing Parliament, and securing the speedy abolition of the unjust, cruel, and pernicious Vaccination laws. For this purpose it has been necessary to speak plainly of the ignorance and incompetence displayed by the Royal Commission, proofs of which I give from their "Final Report" and the evidence they have collected and printed.
I most solemnly urge upon our Legislators that this is a question not only of the
liberties of Englishmen, but one affecting the
lives of their children, and the
health of the whole community; and that they will be individually responsible if they do not inquire into this matter for
themselves, �not accept the statements or opinions of others.
In order that they may do this with a minimum expenditure of time and labour, I have put before them the
essential facts, in almost every case taken from the Reports of the Royal Commission or of the Registrar-General, and with references to page, question, or paragraph, so that they can themselves verify every statement I make. I thus abundantly prove, first, that in all previous legislation they have been misled by facts and figures that are untrue and by promises that have been all unfulfilled; and that similar misstatements have characterised the whole official advocacy of Vaccination from the time of Jenner down to this day. I claim, therefore, that all official statements as to Vaccination are
untrustworthy.
I then show that
all the statistics of small-pox mortality, whether of London; of England, Scotland, and Ireland; of the best vaccinated Continental States; of unvaccinated Leicester; or of the revaccinated Army and Navy, without any exception, prove the
absolute inutility of Vaccination; and I feel confident that every unprejudiced person who will carefully read these few pages, and will verify such of my statements as seem to them most incredible, will be
compelled to come to the same conclusion.
I appeal from the medical and official apologists of Vaccination to the intelligence and common sense of my fellow-countrymen, and I urge them to insist upon the immediate abolition of all legislation enforcing or supporting this useless and dangerous operation.
CHAPTER 1: VACCINATION AND SMALL-POX
AMONG the greatest self-created scourges of civilized humanity are the group of zymotic diseases, or those which arise from infection, and are believed to be due to the agency of minute organisms which rapidly increase in bodies offering favourable conditions, and often cause death. Such diseases arc: plague, small-pox, measles, whooping-cough, yellow fever, typhus and enteric fevers, scarlet fever and diphtheria, and cholera. Time conditions which especially favour these diseases are foul air and water, decaying organic matter, overcrowding, and other unwholesome surroundings, whence they have been termed "filth diseases." The most terrible and fatal of these�the plague�prevails only where people live under the very worst sanitary conditions as regards ventilation, water supply, and general cleanliness.
Till about 250 years ago it was as common in England as small-pox has been during the present century, but a very partial and limited advance in healthy conditions of life entirely abolished it, its place being to some extent taken by small-pox, cholera, and fevers. The exact mode by which, all these diseases spread is not known; cholera, typhus, and enteric fever are believed to be communicated through the dejecta from the patient contaminating drinking water. The other diseases are spread either by bodily contact or by tranmission of germs through the air; but with all of them there must be conditions favouring their reception and increase. Not only are many persons apparently insusceptible through life to some of these diseases, but all the evidence goes to show that, if the whole population of a country lived under thoroughly healthy conditions as regards pure air, pure water, and wholesome food, none of them could ever obtain a footing, and they would die out as completely as the plague and leprosy have died out, though both were once so prevalent in England.
But during the last century there was no such knowledge, and no general belief in. the efficacy of simple, healthy conditions of life as the only effectual safeguard against these diseases. Small-pox, although then, as now, an epidemic disease and of very varying degrees of virulence, was much dreaded, because, owing chiefly to improper treatment, it was often fatal, and still more often produced disfigurement or even blindness.
When, therefore, the method of inoculation was introduced from the East in the early part of the eighteenth century, it was quickly welcomed, because a mild form of the disease was produced which rarely caused death or disfigurement, though it was believed to be an effectual protection against taking the disease by ordinary infection. It was, however, soon found that the mild small-pox usually produced by inoculation was quite as infectious as the natural disease, and became quite as fatal to persons who caught it. Towards the end of the last century many medical men became so impressed with its danger that they advocated more attention to sanitation and the isolation of patients, because inoculation, though it may have saved individuals, really increased the total deaths from small-pox.
Under these circumstances we can well understand the favourable reception given to an operation which produced a slight,
non-infectious disease, which yet was alleged to protect against small-pox as completely as did the inoculated disease itself. This was Vaccination, which arose from the belief of farmers in Gloucestershire and elsewhere that, those who had caught cowpox from cows were free from small-pox for the rest of their lives. Jenner, in. 1798, published his
Inquiry giving an account of the facts which, in his opinion, proved this to be the case. But in. the light of our present knowledge we see that they are wholly inconclusive.
Six of his patients had had cow-pox when young, and were inoculated with smallpox in the usual way from twenty-one to fifty-three years afterwards, and because they did not take the disease, he concluded that the cow-pox had preserved them. But we know that a considerable proportion of persons in middle age are insusceptible to small-pox infection; besides which even those who most strongly uphold vaccination now admit that its effects die out entirely in a few years�some say four or five, some ten�so that these people who had had cow-pox so long before were certainly
not protected by it from taking smallpox. Several other patients were farriers or stable men who were infected by horse-grease, not by cowpox, and were also said to be insusceptible to small-pox inoculation, though not so completely as those who had had cow-pox.
The remainder of Jenner�s cases were six children, from five to eight years old, who were vaccinated, and then inoculated a few weeks or months afterwards. These cases are fallacious from two causes. In the first place, any remnant of the effects of the vaccination (which were sometimes severe), or the existence of scurvy, then very prevalent, or of any other skin-disease, might prevent the test.. inoculation from producing any effect.� (1).
The other cause of uncertainty arises from the fact that this "variolous test" consisted in inoculating with smallpox virus obtained from the
last of a series of successive patients in whom the effect produced was a minimum, consisting of very few pustules, sometimes only one, and a very slight amount of fever. The results of this test, whether on a person who had had cow-pox or who had not had it, was usually so slight that it could easily be described by a believer in the influence of the one disease on the other as having "no effect"; and Dr. Creighton declares, after a study of the whole literature of the subject, that the description of the results of the test is almost always loose and general, and that in the few cases where more detail is given the symptoms described are almost the same in the vaccinated as in the unvaccinated.
Again, no careful tests were ever made by inoculating at the same time, and in exactly the same way, two groups of persons of similar age, constitution, and health, the one group having been vaccinated the other not, and none of them having had small-pox, and then having the resulting effects carefully described and compared by independent experts.
Such "control" experiments would now be required in any case of such importance as this; but it was never done in the early days of vaccination, and it appears never to have been done to this day. The alleged "test" was, it is true, applied in a great number of cases by the early observers, especially by Dr. Woodville, physician to a small-pox hospital; but Dr. Creighton shows reason for believing that the lymph he used was contaminated with small-pox, and that the supposed vaccinations were really inoculations.
This lymph was widely spread all over the country, and was supplied to Jenner himself, and we thus have explained the effect of the "vaccination" in preventing the subsequent "inoculation" from producing much effect, since both were really mild forms of small-pox inoculation. This matter is fully explained by Dr. Creighton in his evidence before the Royal Commission, printed in the Second Report. Professor E. M. Crookshank, who has made a special study of cow-pox and other animal diseases and their relation to human small-pox, gives important confirmatory evidence, to be found in the Fourth Report.
This brief statement of the early history of vaccination has been introduced here in order to give what seems to be a probable explanation of the remarkable fact that a large portion of the medical profession accepted, as proved, that vaccination, protected against a subsequent inoculation of small-pox, when in reality there was no such proof, as the subsequent history of small-pox epidemics has shown. The medical and other members of the Royal Commission could not realize the possibility of such a failure to get at the truth.
Again and again they asked the witnesses above referred to to explain how it was possible that so many educated specialists could be thus deceived. They overlooked the fact that a century ago was, as regards the majority of the medical profession, a pre-scientific age; and nothing proves this more clearly than the absence of any systematic "control" experiments, and the extreme haste with which some of the heads of the profession expressed their belief in the lifelong protection against small-pox afforded by vaccination, only four years after the discovery had been first announced. this testimony caused :Parliament to vote Jenner �10,000 in 1802.
Ample proof now exists of the fallacy of this belief, since vaccination gives no protection whatever, as will be shown later on. But there was also no lack of proof of this failure to protect in the first ten years of the century; and had it not been for the unscientific haste of the medical witnesses to declare that vaccination protected against small-pox during a whole life-time�a fact of which they had not and could not possibly have any evidence�this proof of failure would have convinced them and have prevented what is really one of the scandals of the nineteenth century. These early proofs of failure will be now briefly indicated.
Only six years after the announcement of vaccination, in 1804, Dr. B. Moseley, Physician to Chelsea Hospital, published a small book on the cow-pox, containing many cases of persons who bad been properly vaccinated and had afterwards had small-pox; and. other cases of severe illness, injury, and even death resulting from vaccination; and these failures were admitted by the Royal Jennerian Society in their Report in 1806. Dr. William Rowley, Physician to the St. Marylebone Infirmary, in. a work on
Cow-pox Inoculation in 1805, which reached a third edition in 1806, gave particulars of 504 cases of small-pox and injury after vaccination, with seventy-five deaths. He says to his brother medical men: "Come and see.
I have lately had some of the worst species of malignant small-pox in the Marylebone Infirmary, which many of the faculty have examined and know to have been vaccinated." For two days he had an exhibition in his Lecture Room of a number of children suffering from terrible eruptions and other diseases after vaccination.
Dr. Squirrel, formerly Resident Apothecary to the Small-pox and Inoculation Hospital, also published in. 1805 numerous cases of small-pox, injuries, and death after vaccination.
John Birch, a London surgeon, at first adopted vaccination and corresponded with Jenner, but soon, finding that it did not protect from small-pox and that fatal diseases, he became one of its strongest opponents, and published many letters and pamphlets against it up to the time of his death in 1815.
Mr. William Goldson, a surgeon at Portsea, published a pamphlet in 1804, giving many cases in his own experience of small-pox following vaccination. What made his testimony more important was that he was a believer in vaccination, and sent accounts of some of his cases to Jenner so early as 1802, but no notice was taken of them.�(2)
Mr. Thomas Brown, a surgeon of Musselburgh, published in 1809 a volume giving his experiences of the results of vaccination. He had at first accepted and practised it. He also applied the "variolous test" with apparent success, and thereafter went on vaccinating in full confidence that it was protective against small-pox, till 1808, when, during an. epidemic, many of his patients caught the disease from two to eight years after vaccination. He gives the details of forty-eight cases, all within his own personal knowledge, and he says he knew of many others. He then again tried the "variolous test," and found twelve cases in which it entirely failed, the result being exactly as with those who were inoculated without previous vaccination. These cases, with extracts from Brown�s work, were brought before the Royal Commission by Professor Crookshank (See 4th Report, Q. 11,852.)
Again, Mr. William Tebb brought before the Commission a paper by Dr. Maclean, in the
Medical Observer of 1810, giving 535 cases of small-pox after vaccination, of which 97 were fatal. He also gave 150 cases of diseases from cow-pox, with the names of ten medical men, including two Professors of Anatomy, who had suffered in their own families from vaccination. The following striking passage is quoted :� "
Doctrine.---Vaccination or Cow-pox inoculation is a perfect preventive of small-pox during life. (Jenner, etc.)
Refutation.---505 cases of small-pox after cow-pox.
Doctrine.---Cowpox renders smallpox milder. It is never fatal.
Refutation.�97 deaths from smallpox after cow-pox and from cowpox diseases."
The cases here referred to, of failure of vaccination to protect even for a few years, are probably only a small fraction of those that occurred, since only in exceptional cases would a doctor be able to keep his patients in view, and only one doctor here and there would publish his observations.
The controversy was carried on with unusual virulence, hence perhaps the reason why the public paid so little attention to it. But unfortunately both the heads of the medical profession and the legislature had committed themselves by recognising the full claims of Jenner at too early a date and in a manner that admitted of no recall.
In 1802, as already stated, the House of Commons, on the Report of its Committee, and the evidence of the leading physicians and surgeons of London�a large number of whom declared their belief that cow-pox was a perfect security against small-pox � voted Jenner �10,000. When therefore the flood of evidence poured in, showing that it did
not protect, it was already too late to remedy the mischief that had been done, since the profession would not so soon acknowledge its mistake, nor would the legislature admit having hastily voted away the public money without adequate reason.
The vaccinators went on vaccinating, the House of Commons gave Jenner �20,000 more in 1807, endowed vaccination with �3,000 a year in 1808, and after providing for free vaccination in 1840, made the operation compulsory in 1855, and enforced it by penalties in. 1867.
VACCINATION AND THE MEDICAL PROFESSION
Before proceeding to adduce the conclusive evidence that now exists of the failure of vaccination, a few preliminary misconceptions must be dealt with. One of these is, that as vaccination is a surgical operation to guard against a special disease, medical men can alone judge of its value. But the fact is the very reverse, for several reasons. - In the first place, they are interested parties, not merely in a pecuniary sense, but as affecting the prestige of the whole profession.
In no other case should we allow interested persons to decide an important matter. Whether iron ships are safer than wooden ones is not decided by ironmasters or by shipbuilders, but by the experience of sailors and by the statistics of loss. In the administration of medicine or any other remedy for a disease, the conditions are different. The doctor applies the remedy and watches the result, and if he has a large practice he thereby obtains knowledge and experience which no other persons possess.
But in the case of vaccination, and especially in the case of public vaccinators, the doctor does not see the result except by accident. Those who get small-pox go to the hospitals, or are treated by other medical men, or may have left the district, and the relation between the vaccination and the attack of small-pox can only be discovered by the accurate registration of all the cases and deaths, with the facts as to vaccination or revaccination. When these facts are accurately registered, to determine what they teach is not the business of a doctor but of a statistician, and there is much evidence to show that doctors are bad statisticians, and have a special faculty for misstating figures.
This allegation is so grave and so fundamental to the question at issue, that a few facts must be given in support of it.
The National Vaccine establishment, supported by Government grants, issued periodical Reports, which were printed by order of the House of Commons, and in successive years we find the following statements:
In 1812, and again in 1818, it is stated that "previous to the discovery of vaccination the average number of deaths by small-pox within the (London) Bills of Mortality was 2,000 annually; whereas in the last year only 751 persons have died of the disease, although the increase of population within the last ten years has been 133,139."
The number 2,000 is about the average smallpox deaths of the whole eignteenth century, but those of the last two decades before the publication of Jenner�s
Inquiry, were 1,751 and 1,786, showing a decided fall. This, however, may pass. But when we come to the Report for 1826 we find the following: "But when we reflect that before the introduction of vaccination the average number of deaths from small-pox within the Bills of Mortality was annually about 4,000, no stronger argument can reasonably be demanded in favour of the value of this important discovery."
This monstrous figure was repeated in 1834, apparently quite forgetting the correct figure for the whole century given in 1818, and also the fact that the small-pox deaths recorded in the London Bills of Mortality in any year of the century never reached 4,000. But worse is to come; for in 1836 we have the following statement: "The annual loss of life by small-pox in the Metropolis, and within the Bills of Mortality only, before vaccination was established, exceeded 5,000, whereas in the course of last year only 300 died of the distemper." And in the Report for 1838 this gross error is repeated; while in the next year (1839) the conclusion is drawn "that 4,000 lives are saved every year in London since vaccination so largely superseded variolation (3)."
The Board of the National Vaccine Establishment consisted of the President and four Censors of the Royal College of Physicians, and the Master and two senior Wardens of the College of Surgeons. We cannot possibly suppose that they knew or believed that they were publishing untruths and grossly deceiving the public. We must, therefore, fall back upon the supposition that they were careless to such an extent as not to find out that they were authorizing successive statements of the same quantity as inconsistent with each other as 2,000 and 5000.
The next example is given by Dr. Lettsom, who, in his evidence before the Parliamentary Committee in 1802, calculated the small-pox deaths of Great Britain and Ireland before vaccination at 36,000 annually; by taking 3,000 as the annual mortality in London and multiplying by twelve, because the population was estimated to be twelve times as large. He first takes a number which is much too high, and then assumes that the mortality in the town, village, and country populations was the same as in overcrowded, filthy London! Smallpox was always present in London, while Sir Gilbert Blane tells us that in many parts of the country it was quite unknown for periods of twenty, thirty, or forty years. In 1782 Mr. Connah, a surgeon at Seaford, in Sussex, only knew of one small-pox death in eleven years among a population of 700.
Cross, the historian of the Norwich epidemic in 1819, states that previous to 1805 small-pox was little known in this city of 40,000 inhabitants, and was for a time almost extinct; and yet this gross error of computing the small-pox mortality of the whole country from that of London (and computing it from wrong data) was not only accepted at the time, but has been repeated again and again down to the present day as an ascertained fact!
In a speech in Parliament in defence of .vaccination., Sir Lyon Playfair gave 4,000 per million as the average London death-rate by small-pox before vaccination�a number nearly double that of the last twenty years of the century, which alone affords a fair comparison. But far more amazing is the statement by the late Dr. W. B. Carpenter, in a letter to the
Spectator of April, 1881, that "a hundred years ago the small-pox mortality of London alone, with its then population of under a million, was often greater in a six months� epidemic than that of the twenty millions of England & Wales now is in any whole Year."
The facts, well known to every enquirer, are: that the very highest small-pox mortality in the last century in a year was 3,992 in 1772, while in 1871 it was
7,912 in. London, or more than double; and in the same year, in England and Wales, it was
23,000. This amazing and almost incredible misstatement was pointed out and acknowledged privately, but never withdrawn publicly!
The late Mr. Ernest Hart, a medical man., editor of the
British Medical Journal, and a great authority on sanitation, in his work entitled
The Truth about Vaccination, surpasses even Dr. Carpenter in the monstrosity of his errors. At page 35 of the first edition (1880), he states that in. the forty years 1728�57 and 1771�80, the average annual small-pox mortality of London was about 18,000 per million living. The actual average mortality, from the tables given in the Second Report of the Royal Commission, page 290, was a little over 2,000, the worst periods having been chosen; and taking the lowest estimates of the population at the time, the mortality per million would have been under 3,000. This great authority, therefore, has multiplied the real number by six! In a later edition this statement is omitted, but in the first edition it was no mere misprint, for it was triumphantly dwelt upon over a whole page and compared with modern rates of mortality.
Yet one more official misstatement. About the year 1884 the National Health Society, with the approval of the Local Government Board, issued a tract entitled Facts
concerning Vaccination for Heads of Families, in which appeared the statement,
"Before the introduction of vaccination, small-pox killed 40,000 persons
yearly in this country." We have already shown that Dr. Lettsom�s figure, 36,000, was utterly unfounded, and probably three or four times greater than the truth. Here we have a semi-official and widely-distributed statement even more remote from the truth. In later issues of the same tract this particular statement is withdrawn, and a different but equally erroneous one substituted.
Thus: "Before its discovery (vaccination)
the mortality from small-pox in London was forty times greater than it is now." This is an altogether vague and misleading statement. If it means that in
some years of the last century it was forty times greater than in
some years of this century, it is misleading, because even within the last thirty years some years have a mortality not only forty but eighty and even 200 times as great as others. (In 1875 there were ten deaths per million, while in 1871 there were 2,420 deaths per million.) If it means on an average of say twenty years, it is false. For the twenty years 1869-98 the mortality was about 300 per million, while for the last twenty years before the discovery of small-pox it was about 2,000 per million, or less than
seven times as much instead of
forty times!
This same tract is full of other equally gross misstatements. It tells us, in large, black type,
"With due care in the performance of the operation, no risk of any injurious effects from it need be feared." TheRegistrar-General himself shows us that this is false in his Report for 1895, Table 17, p. lii.:
VACCINATION A DELUSION
Hybrid Mode
