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
We will first take Sweden, which has had fairly complete national
statistics longer than any other country, and we are now fortunately
able to give the facts on the most recent official testimony—the Report
furnished by the Swedish Board of Health to the Royal Commission, and
published in the Appendix to their Sixth Report (pp. 751-56). Such great
authorities as Sir William Gull, Dr. Seaton, and Mr. Marson, stated
before the Committee of Enquiry in 1871 that Sweden was one of the best
vaccinated countries, and that the Swedes were the best vaccinators.
Sir John Simon’s celebrated paper, which was laid before Parliament in
1857 and was one of the chief supports of compulsory legislation, made
much of Sweden, and had a special diagram to illustrate the effects
of vaccination on small-pox. This paper is reproduced in the First
Report of the recent Royal Commission (pp. 61-113), and we find the
usual comparison of small-pox mortality in the last and present century
which is held to be conclusive as to the benefits of vaccination. He
says vaccination was introduced in 1801, and divides his diagram into
two halves differently coloured before and after this date. It will be
observed that, as in England, there was a great and sudden decrease of
small-pox mortality after 1801, the date of the _first_ vaccination in
Sweden, and by 1812 the whole reduction of mortality was completed. But
from that date for more than sixty years there was an almost continuous
_increase_ in frequency and severity of the epidemics. To account for
this sudden and enormous decrease Sir John Simon states, in a note, and
without giving his authority: “About 1810 the vaccinations were amounting
to nearly a quarter of the number of births.” But these were almost
certainly both adults and children of various ages, and the official
returns now given show that down to 1812, when the whole reduction of
small-pox mortality had been effected, only 8 per cent. of the population
had been vaccinated. We are told in a note to the official tables that
the first successful vaccination in Stockholm was at the end of 1810,
so that the earlier vaccinations must have been mainly in the rural
districts; yet the earlier Stockholm epidemics in 1807, before a single
inhabitant was vaccinated, and in 1825, were less severe than the six
later ones, when vaccination was far more general.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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