STATISTICAL EVIDENCE OF EXTRA DISEASE.
Relations of individual experience may be disregarded as untrustworthy, but the broad evidence of national statistics conveys authoritative lessons. Vaccination in England was made compulsory in 1853, stringently so in 1867, and systematically extended to the entire population. If therefore it were true that vaccination often communicates more than Vaccinia, and that it aggravates existent and excites latent disease, the proof must be manifest in the statistics of the Registrar-General. Thus argued Mr. C. H. Hopwood, and accordingly he moved in the House of Commons successively for three Returns, published as follows—Vaccination, Mortality, No. 433, 1877; Mortality (General and Infant), No. 76, 1880; and Deaths (England and Wales), No. 392, 1880.
These Returns, charged with curious and authentic information, are little known, and have been treated with significant silence by the press. Obscurantism is not confined to ecclesiastics. Our valiant journalists who mock at the Index Expurgatorius, and abhor the Russian censorship, are in their little way as ready to act the same part in favour of established prejudice. If facts adverse to the public confidence in vaccination are revealed, it is considered no more than decent to keep them out of sight.
What then is the evidence of Mr. Hopwood’s Returns? Briefly this: they clearly illustrate that vaccination does produce, intensify, excite and inoculate disease whose issue is death. The record of infant mortality from fifteen specified diseases related to vaccination stands thus—
| Prior to Vaccination Act—1847-53— | |
| Infants died, 1847, | 62,619 |
| Out of a population of 17,927,609. | |
| Vaccination Obligatory—1854-67— | |
| Infants died, 1854, | 73,000 |
| Do. 1867, | 92,827 |
| Out of a population of 20,066,224. | |
| Vaccination Enforced—1868-75— | |
| Infants died, 1868, | 96,282 |
| Do. 1875, | 106,173 |
| Out of a population of 22,712,266. |
Thus, while the population of England and Wales had increased from 18 to 23 millions, the deaths of infants from fifteen diseases had risen from 63,000 to 106,000. Had the mortality kept pace with the population, the deaths in 1875 would only have been 80,000; that is to say, in 1875 there perished in England 26,000 infants who would have lived had vaccination remained as little in vogue as in 1847! The result though startling in the gross is precisely what might have been predicted. The infancy of a country cannot be systematically diseased, that is vaccinated, without exciting and aggravating other maladies, and thereby enlarging the harvest of death.