VACCINAL FATALITIES.
Here we have Vaccinia defined as disease with precautions for its safe reception; yet withal it is allowed it may assert itself with virulence. But where do we find any precautions exercised in the vaccination of the poor?—that is to say, of the vast majority. Precautions are not only disregarded, they are unknown, they are impracticable. Infants of all sorts and conditions are operated on as recklessly as sheep are marked. Whether they live or die is matter of official indifference, whilst each is warrant for an official fee. Sir Joseph Pease, speaking in the House of Commons, said, “The President of the Local Government Board cannot deny that children die under the operation of the Vaccination Acts in a wholesale way.” Vaccination conveys an acute specific disease (having a definite course to run like smallpox or other fever) which, whether by careless treatment, or superinduced, or latent disease, is frequently attended with serious and fatal issues. Hence it is that vaccination is dreaded and detested by the poor on whom it is inflicted without parley or mitigation; in itself a bearer of illness, it is likewise a cruel aggravation of weakness and illness. When the poor complain that their children are injured or slain by vaccination, they are officially informed they are mistaken. Dr. Stevens, a well-known familiar of the vaccination office, says he has seen more vaccination than any man, and has yet to witness the least injury from the practice. Variolators used to say the same of their practice until vaccinators arose and convicted them of lying. Coroner Lankester held that vaccination was not a cause of death “recognised by law,” and was therefore an impossible cause. Such prevarication is mockery. True it is that, if a child dies of vaccination, it dies of erysipelas, or pyœmia, or diarrhœa, and it is easy enough to ignore the primary cause and assert the secondary; but I would ask, How else can death ensue from vaccination than by erysipelas, pyœmia, diarrhœa, or similar sequelæ? If vaccination kills a child, how otherwise could it kill? Even should death occur directly from surgical shock, it would be said, the child did not die of vaccination, but from lack of vigour to sustain a trivial operation. The Sangrado of the Stevens pattern is never without a shuffle.