GRAVE NATURE OF RECENT EPIDEMIC OF INFLUENZA AND PNEUMONIA, AND POSSIBLE RELATION OF VACCINATION THERETO

From the rapidity, severity, and mortality of this disease, it would seem not to be a true influenza, as heretofore known, and as its worst cases are characterized by a rapid and fatal ending, with a few days’ sickness, in malignant or septic pneumonia, with abscesses in the lungs, it seems more related to the very fatal “Pneumonic Plague” which raged in Manchuria after the Japanese war. This suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the chief germ found in the fatal cases is the “streptococcus,” which is found in the worst forms of “blood poisoning” or “septicemia,” and also in vaccination. Now, the act of ordinary vaccination, as already proved, is, in itself, an act of blood poisoning, pure and simple, and it is so classed in medical and statistical works as a form of “septicemia,” and one disease germ commonly found, with many others, in vaccine virus is the streptococcus, which is the chief germ found in all bad pus infections and abscess formations. Therefore, as the act of vaccination is simply the impregnation of the body and blood with a pus infection identical with “septicemia” or “pyæmia,” and as this infecting process has been repeated at wholesale in the bodies of thousands and tens of thousands of men closely massed in camps, should it be any wonder if an epidemic of some sort of “septicemia” should crop out at some time under such conditions?

In leading medical and statistical works, both influenza and pneumonia and typhoid fever and vaccination are all classed as different forms of “septicemia,” and while I do not, of course, know, and do not say, that the recent epidemic of influenza and pneumonia was actually caused by vaccination, yet I repeat that when the body and blood of millions of men all over this country and Europe are deliberately impregnated with various septic diseases, or septicemic infections, can any reasonable person, whether doctor or layman, be surprised if such world-wide, and million times repeated, acts of septicemic infection should be ultimately proved to have some causative or conditional relation to the recent world-wide epidemic of septicemic disease? Is it physically or medically possible to go on sowing and spreading some known and unknown septic diseases at wholesale, within human bodies, without reaping some big harvest of deadly septic diseases as a necessary consequence? In the words of Scripture, can we keep on “sowing” the “winds” of infection without ultimately “reaping” the “whirlwind” of epidemics?

It has been suggested that this epidemic originated in the multi-vaccinated and diseased or impoverished German army and has traveled one-quarter round the earth from that focus of infection.

It has also been suggested that this epidemic originated from a regiment of coolies or native Hindoo troops brought from India to France who were infected with a severe disease like Pneumonic Plague, and from them this disease spread to the other soldiers in camp and field and thence over the world.

It has been further suggested that this disease should not be called a true influenza or pneumonia at all, but is essentially a most virulent form of general septicemia, and that it originated from the frightfully infected soil of the battle-fields, which, in addition to the ordinary deadly soil infections, contains virulent septicemic and cadaveric infections from the great mass of buried and unburied bodies. And as the soldiers in camp and field were already impregnated with several septicemic infections in the multiple vaccinations of five or six kinds to which they have been almost universally subjected, their systems thus became “sensitized” or highly susceptible to further infection, particularly to what was evidently a new and very severe type of soil and cadaveric infection. This theory seems to fit the present known facts and would explain the probable origin of this very severe type of virulent septicemic plague, which shows itself in this mysterious and deadly epidemic with its mortality of thirty to sixty per cent., which we have been improperly regarding as ordinary influenza and pneumonia.

In my letter to the Secretary of War I proved that there was a distinct medical and logical relation between influenza and vaccination, and that many serious diseases, including smallpox and cowpox, commence like influenza and may be mistaken for it,[2] but I do not need to go into proof of that point here, but can now say that this point further strengthens the suspicions stated that the recent epidemic of influenza and septicemia or septic pneumonia may have had some causative relation to the extensive wholesale and repeated vaccinations in the military camps throughout the world, and would indicate, according to another theory, that this vaccine infection had escaped from and overflowed its usual bounds and was running wild as a world-wide epidemic infection; and hence the positive and compelling reasons for checking this overflowing infection by suspending all vaccination while this epidemic and infecting condition exists, and making all vaccination voluntary instead of compulsory as heretofore.