Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime: Proved by the Official Evidence in the Reports of the Royal Commission — John Shaqi
Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime: Proved by the Official Evidence in the Reports of the Royal CommissionWallace, Alfred Russel
Science
Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime: Proved by the Official Evidence in the Reports of the Royal Commission
Wallace, Alfred Russel
Vaccination
The most interesting feature of this diagram is the striking difference
in the death-rates of the two countries. Scotland, the richer,
more populous, and more prosperous country having a much greater
mortality, both from the two zymotics and from small-pox, than poor,
famine-stricken, depopulated Ireland. The maximum death-rate by the two
zymotics in Scotland is considerably more than double that in Ireland,
and the minimum is larger in the same proportion. In small-pox the
difference is also very large in the same direction, for although the
death-rate during the great epidemic in 1872 was only one-fourth greater
in Scotland, yet as the epidemic there lasted three years, the total
death-rate for those years was nearly twice as great as for the same
period in Ireland, which, however, had a small epidemic later on in 1878.
Since 1883 small-pox has been almost absent from both countries, as from
England; but taking the twenty years of repeated epidemics from 1864 to
1883, we find the average small-pox death-rate of Scotland to be about
139, and that of Ireland 85 per million, or considerably more than as
three to two. But even Scotland had a much lower small-pox mortality
than England, the proportions being as follows for the three years which
included the epidemic of 1871-3:
Ireland, 800 per million in the three years.
Scotland, 1,450 per million in the three years.
England, 2,000 per million in the three years.
Now the Royal Commissioners make no remark whatever on these very
suggestive facts, and they have arranged the information in tables in
such a way as to render it very difficult to discover them; and this is
another proof of their incapacity to deal with statistical questions.
They seem to be unable to look at small-pox from any other point of view
than that of the vaccinationist, and thus miss the essential features
of the evidence they have before them. Every statistician knows the
enormous value of the representation of tabular statistics by means
of diagrammatic curves. It is the only way by which in many cases the
real teaching of statistics can be detected. An enormous number of such
diagrams, more or less instructive and complete, were presented to them,
and, at great cost, are printed in the Reports; but I cannot find that,
in their _Final Report_, they have made any adequate use of them, or have
once referred to them, and thus it is that they have overlooked so many
of the most vital teachings of the huge mass of figures with which they
had to deal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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