FURTHER PROOF FROM THE ENGLISH MINISTER OF HEALTH THAT SANITATION PREVENTS SMALLPOX MORE THAN VACCINATION. POORLY VACCINATED LONDON MORE HEALTHY THAN MUCH-VACCINATED BERLIN
In a speech by the Hon. John Burns, Minister of Health for England and Wales, in the House of Commons on April 11, 1912, he gave the following clear statement showing that vaccination cannot be alone credited with the reduction of smallpox, but that, as a matter of fact, smallpox had declined as vaccination was reduced and as sanitation and other benign conditions of human life had increased. These most significant facts are fully expressed in the following extract from the official speech, which speaks clearly for itself and needs no further comment here.
“I am not at all alarmed by the comparison made with Germany.... I entertain the respect for figures tempered by fact, which every responsible man ought to have. Just in proportion as in recent years exemptions (from vaccination) have gone up from four per cent. to thirty per cent., so deaths from smallpox have declined.... The facts are these: I am right in giving these figures with regard to London. During the time that I have had the honor of being at the Local Government Board the following have been the deaths from smallpox in a city of 4,500,000 inhabitants: 1906, no deaths; 1907, no deaths; 1908, no deaths; 1909, two deaths; 1910, no deaths. So that in five years there have only been two deaths from smallpox in a city of 4,500,000 people. Not even Germany or Berlin can transcend those figures by the increasing cleanliness, increasing sobriety and greater attention paid both by the community and individuals to removing all causes of smallpox, and nearly every other disease.... I believe that all this fear and panic, all this talk about plague and smallpox, is due to misconception and misapprehension of social facts. These diseases are in a very different position from what they were in ten, twenty, thirty or forty years ago, and it is a creditable and a happy circumstance that I, as Minister of Health for England and Wales, am enabled to state that in regard to the administration of public health no other country is comparable to ours, and I am pleased to have heard such hearty recognition of our efforts from the different speakers this afternoon.”
I therefore think that this close study of vaccination facts thus far presented must convince every reasonable mind, lay or medical, that if these benign conditions of sanitation, isolation, etc., had been generally adopted and enforced for the past century, in place of the dangerous remedy of general or compulsory vaccination, smallpox would have become extinct before this time and as much of a medical curiosity as Plague, Cholera, Typhus and Scurvy now are, which at one time slaughtered their thousands every year!
I also believe that it is probably due to this evil practice of general vaccination, which is simply the propagation and infliction on the general population of actual smallpox in one of its various forms, that the pestilence of smallpox has been kept alive as a still dangerous menace to human health and life, ready to burst out into conflagration wherever vaccination is recklessly and extensively used, as in the recent case of Japan, or where sanitation is grossly neglected, instead of being now a medical curiosity, like the other great plagues of the past which we have successfully extinguished without any vaccination. And as smallpox is the only one of the ancient plagues that we have deliberately cultivated, propagated and constantly inflicted upon the human population, under a barbarous and false theory of thereby preventing disease, is it any wonder, in common sense and common logic, that we have so signally succeeded in keeping this ancient plague alive by this strange medical malpractice, while the other ancient plagues have become extinguished?