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
In the Report of the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board for
1884, it is alleged that when an adult is revaccinated “he will receive
the full measure of protection that vaccination is capable of giving
him.” In the same year the Medical Officer of the General Post Office
stated in a circular, “It is desirable, in order to obtain full security,
that the operation (vaccination) should be repeated at a later period of
life”; and the circular of the National Health Society already referred
to states that “soldiers who have been revaccinated can live in cities
intensely affected by small-pox without themselves suffering to any
appreciable degree from the disease.” Let us then see how far these
official statements are true or false.
In their _Final Report_ the Commissioners give the statistics of
small-pox mortality in the Army and Navy from 1860 to 1894, and, although
the latest order for the vaccination of the whole force in the Navy
was only made in 1871, there can be no doubt that, practically, the
whole of the men had been revaccinated long before that period;[15] but
certainly since 1873 all without exception, both English and foreign,
were revaccinated; and in the Army every recruit has been revaccinated
since 1860 (see 2nd Report, Q. 3,453, 3,455; and for the Navy, Q. 2,645,
6, 3,212-13, and 3,226-3,229). Brigade-Surgeon William Nash, M.D.,
informed the Commission that the vaccination and revaccination of the
Army was “as perfect as endeavours can make it,” and that he can make no
suggestion to increase its thoroughness (Q. 3,559, 3,560).
Turning now to the diagram (No. XI.) which represents the official
statistics, the two lower solid lines show the small-pox death-rate per
100,000 of the force of the Army and Navy for each year, from 1860 to
1894. The lower thick line shows the Army mortality, the thin line that
of the Navy. The two higher lines show the total death-rate from disease
of the Navy, and of the Home force of the Army, as the tables supplied do
not separate the deaths by disease of that portion of the Army stationed
abroad.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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