THE PHILIPPINE FALSEHOOD
There is one Government Report on vaccination in the Philippine Islands, which is often quoted by vaccinators to show the utter harmlessness of vaccination, which claims that from three to five millions of vaccinations have been performed on the population of the Philippines, without a single injury or death! Now, this reckless report might be made correct if slightly amended by the Goddess of Truth to read as follows: “Three to five millions vaccinated without a single injury or death”—which has ever been honestly acknowledged! It is, of course, shamefully false on its face to say that three to five millions of vaccinations were ever inflicted in the Philippines or anywhere else without any injuries or deaths; and the mind which can accept such a statement without a big logical and moral squirm does not understand the real nature of vaccination, the facts of vital statistics, or the first principles of mere mathematical chances, proportions and probabilities, as I will now show.
In the first place, a million is such a gigantic number that any person who has any disrespect for or trifles with it is not fit to discuss this subject. For example: if a man were to live for a million days he would have to be about three thousand years old! Whereas the average life of a man is much less than fifty years or about one-sixtieth of a million days! Now, if a man were to subject himself for the whole average lifetime of fifty years, or one-sixtieth of a million days, to the ordinary, benign, and necessary conditions of breathing air, drinking water and milk and eating food, he could not possibly do this without at some time contracting some disease and possible death from these perfectly normal, necessary, and benign conditions of breathing, eating and drinking, as most of our diseases and infections are admittedly contracted through these three benign sources! Yet our Government-trifler in millions wants us to believe that you could inflict on the human body—millions of times—not a purely benign action, but the purely and doubly malign act of vaccination, which consists in first wounding the body and then injecting into this wound a virulent septicemic infection, without causing a single injury or death! In other words, the doubly malign act—wounding and infecting the human body with a complex pus infection—is utterly harmless and less injurious than the purely benign acts of breathing, eating and drinking, which demonstrably cannot be practised for one-sixtieth of a million days by any human being without a possible serious injury or death!
Here is surely the “reductio ad absurdum” which shows that such a reckless statement of the harmlessness of vaccination by the millions is, of course, a stupid and shameful medical falsehood on its face and is pretty close to being a medical crime on the people, as any honest doctor or intelligent layman must know who has given any serious consideration to this subject, or who has any idea of what vaccination is, or who knows anything of disease infections, vital statistics and the laws of mere mathematical chances and probabilities.
Indeed, every competent doctor knows that you could not subject the human body to a mere pin scratch for a million times without causing several serious injuries or possible deaths from resulting infections. And every competent doctor and student of vital statistics knows also that there are actually more deaths caused every year by mere pin scratches and trifling cuts, wounds and abrasions, resulting in lockjaw, septicemia, erysipelas and other infections than from the dreaded smallpox itself.
Is it not, therefore, rather strange, Mr. President, that vaccination should be reported as so utterly harmless in the distant Philippines, where we can not easily get at the records, when we know it is so deadly in the near-by England and America, where the accessible records show that it causes, frequently, more deaths than smallpox, as I have already proved? For example: the great English Commission on Vaccination found that deaths from vaccination were sometimes as high as seventy deaths per million vaccinated. This is twice as high as the mortality from smallpox in the United States, which for five years, from 1901 to 1905, including our last great epidemic period of 1901 and 1902, averaged only thirty-four deaths per million population! See U. S. Mortality Statistics for 1907, page 40. The Reports of the Registrar General of England for 1906, 1907 and 1908 give a death-rate from infantile vaccination in those years which runs as high as forty-two deaths per million children vaccinated! Here we see that, according to some of our highest statistical authorities, vaccination is not harmless, but is so very harmful that its ratio of mortality per million vaccinated is sometimes twice as great as the ratio of smallpox mortality per million population, and including an epidemic period!
We therefore think, Mr. President, that these points and facts make sufficient answer to, and refutation of, the shocking medical lie that vaccination is perfectly harmless, and, per contra, prove that general vaccination is actually more dangerous to public health and human life to-day than natural smallpox, just as that great medical blunder of a past century—smallpox inoculation—was proved to be more dangerous than the natural disease and was finally prohibited by penal law. And I feel sure that compulsory vaccination will follow the same course and be legally prohibited for the same reason in the present century.