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
[20] It is a common practice of vaccinists to quote the German Army as
a striking proof of the good effects of revaccination; but as our own
Army is as well vaccinated as the Army surgeons with unlimited power can
make it, it is unlikely that the Germans can do so very much better. And
there is some reason to think that _their_ statistics are less reliable
than our own. Lieut.-Col. A. T. Wintle, (late) R.A., has published in the
_Vaccination Inquirer_ extracts from a letter from Germany stating, on
the authority of a German officer, that the Army statistics of small-pox
are _utterly unreliable_. It is said to be the rule for Army surgeons
to enter small-pox cases as skin-disease or some other “appropriate
illness,” while large numbers of small-pox deaths are entered as “sent
away elsewhere.” We had better therefore be content with our own Army and
Navy statistics, though even here there is some concealment. In 1860 Mr.
Duncombe, M.P., moved for a return of the disaster at Shorncliffe Camp,
where, it was alleged, 30 recruits were vaccinated, and six died of the
results, but the return was refused. A letter in the _Lancet_ of July 7,
1860, from a “Military Surgeon” stated that numbers of soldiers have had
their arms amputated in consequence of mortification after vaccination;
and a Baptist minister and ex-soldier, the Rev. Frederick J. Harsant,
gave evidence before the Commission of another Shorncliffe disaster in
1868, he himself, then a soldier, having never recovered, and having
had unhealed sores on various parts of his body for more than 20 years.
Eighteen out of the twenty men vaccinated at the same time suffered; some
were months in hospital and in a much worse condition than himself (6th
Report, p. 207). In the same volume is the evidence of twenty medical
men, all of whom have witnessed serious effects produced by vaccination,
some being of a most terrible and distressing character.
[21] Brief statement of the argument:
The chances of a person having small-pox a second time may be roughly
estimated thus: Suppose the average annual death-rate by small-pox to
be 500 per million, and the average duration of life forty years. Then
the proportion of the population that die of small-pox will be 500 × 40
= 20,000 per million. If the proportion of deaths to cases is one to
five, there will he 100,000 cases of small-pox per million during the
life of that million, so that one-tenth of the whole population will have
small-pox once during their lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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