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
This official statement was quoted in the House of Commons as strikingly
showing the value of vaccination. But, like so many other official
statements, it was all wrong! The reports of the Melbourne and Sydney
inspectors have been obtained, and it is found: (1) That there were on
board this ship 723 passengers and 120 crew—843 in all, instead of 312;
so that the “pains” taken by the Local Government Board to get “the
figures” were very ineffectual. (2) There were 29 cases among the 235
passengers who disembarked at Melbourne, of whom only 1 was unvaccinated.
The crew had _all_ been revaccinated before starting, yet 14 of them
were attacked, and one died. All these in addition to the cases given
by the Local Government Board. Thus 18 revaccinated persons caught the
disease, instead of 4, as first stated, and 69 vaccinated, instead of 48;
while among the 15 cases alleged to be unvaccinated _three_ were infants
under one year old, and _two_ more between five and ten years. (3) The
official reports from Melbourne and Sydney stated that the vessel was
greatly overcrowded, that the sanitary arrangements were very bad, and
the inspector at Sydney declared the vessel to be the “filthiest ship he
had had to deal with”!
Here, then, we have a case in which _all_ the official _figures_, paraded
as being the result of “taking some pains,” are wrong, not to a trifling
extent, but so grossly that they might be supposed to apply to some
quite different ship. And the essential fact of the filthy, overcrowded,
and unsanitary condition of the ship was unknown or concealed; and
the case was adduced as one showing how unimportant is sanitation as
regards small-pox. What the case really proves is, that under unsanitary
conditions neither vaccination nor revaccination has the slightest effect
in preventing the spread of small-pox, since the proportion of the cases
among the revaccinated crew was almost exactly the same as that of the
whole of the cases (omitting the three infants) to the whole population
on the ship.
With this example of officially quoted _facts_ (!) in support of
vaccination, coming at the end of the long series we have given or
referred to in the first part of this work, it is not too much to ask
that all such unverified statements be, once and for ever, ruled out
of court. (See _Final Report_, pp. 205-6; and Second Report, Q.
5,942-5,984.)
[24] So late as 1892 (Jan. 16) the _Lancet_ declared in a leading
article: “No one need die of small-pox; indeed, no one need have it
unless he likes—that is to say, he can be absolutely protected by
vaccination once repeated.” Surely, never before was misstatement so
ignorantly promulgated, or so completely refuted!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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