| Year. | Deaths. |
|---|---|
| 1881 | 58 |
| 1882 | 65 |
| 1883 | 55 |
| 1884 | 53 |
| 1885 | 52 |
| 1886 | 45 |
| 1887 | 45 |
| 1888 | 45 |
| 1889 | 58 |
| 1890 | 43 |
| 1891 | 43 |
| 1892 | 58 |
| 1893 | 59 |
| 1894 | 50 |
| 1895 | 56 |
An average of 52 children officially murdered every year, and officially acknowledged, is termed “alleged injury,” which need not be feared! And these cruel falsehoods are spread broadcast over the country, and the tract bears upon its title-page—
[Revised by the Local Government Board, and issued with their sanction].
As the tract bears no date, I cannot tell whether it is still issued; but it was in circulation up to the time when the Commission was sitting, and it is simply disgraceful that a Government Department should ever have given its official sanction to such a tissue of misrepresentations and palpable false statements. For these 785 deaths in fifteen years, and 390 in the preceding twenty-two years (classed as from erysipelas after vaccination), no one has been punished, and no compensation or even official apology has been given to the thousand sorrowing families. And we may be sure that these acknowledged deaths are only a small portion of what have really occurred, since the numbers have increased considerably in the later period, during which more attention has been given to such deaths and more inquests held. It is certain that for every such death acknowledged by the medical man concerned, many are concealed under the easy method of stating some of the later symptoms as the cause of death. Thus, Mr. Henry May, Medical Officer of Health, candidly states as follows: “In certificates given by us voluntarily, and to which the public have access, it is scarcely to be expected that a medical man will give opinions which may tell against or reflect upon himself in any way. In such cases he will most likely tell the truth, but not the whole truth, and assign some prominent symptom of the disease as the cause of death. As instances of cases which may tell against the medical man himself, I will mention erysipelas from vaccination, and puerperal fever. A death from the first cause occurred not long ago in my practice; and although I had not vaccinated the child, yet, in my desire to preserve vaccination from reproach, I omitted all mention of it from my certificate of death.” (See Birmingham Medical Review, Vol III., pp. 34, 35.) That such suppressio veri is no new thing, but has been going on during the whole period of vaccination, is rendered probable by a statement in the Medical Observer of 1810, by Dr. Maclean. He says: “Very few deaths from cow-pox appear in the Bills of Mortality, owing to the means which have been used to suppress a knowledge of them. Neither were deaths, diseases, and failures transmitted in great abundance from the country, not because they did not happen, but because some practitioners were interested in not seeing them, and others who did see them were afraid of announcing what they knew.”
As an example of the number of cases occurring all over the country, Mr. Charles Fox, a medical man residing at Cardiff, has published fifty-six cases of illness following vaccination, of which seventeen resulted in death. In only two of these, where he himself gave the certificate, was vaccination mentioned. All of these cases were examined by himself personally. Among those who survived, several were permanently injured in health, and some were crippled for life; while in most of the cases the inflammation and eruptions are so painful, and the sufferings of the children so great and so prolonged, that the mother endures continuous mental torture, lasting for weeks, months, or even years. And if one medical man can record such a mass of injury and disease in which vaccination was the palpable starting-point and certainly a contributory cause, what must be the total mass of unrecorded suffering throughout the whole country? Considering this and other evidence, together with the admitted and very natural concealment by the doctors concerned, “to save vaccination from reproach,” the estimate of Mr. Alfred Milnes, a statistician who has paid special attention to the subject, that the officially admitted deaths must be at least multiplied by twelve to obtain the real deaths from vaccination, we shall arrive at the terrible number of over 600 children and adults killed annually by this compulsory operation; while judging from the proportion of permanent injury (twenty-eight) in Mr. Fox’s fifty-six cases and seventeen deaths, about 1,000 persons annually must suffer from it throughout their lives! As confirmatory of even this large amount, the testimony of Mr. Davidson, Medical Officer of Health for Congleton, and formerly a Public Vaccinator, is important. He began an inquiry into the alleged injurious effects of vaccination, without believing that they were serious. The outcome of his investigation was startling to him. In his Annual Report for 1893, he says: “In the investigation of a single vaccination period, the fact was revealed that in quite fifty per cent. of all vaccinated in that period (about seventy), the results were abnormal, and, in a large number of these very grave injuries had been inflicted. That the results of the practice are the same elsewhere as in Congleton I have no reason to doubt, for judging from what I have seen of his method of vaccinating, our Public Vaccinator is as careful as it seems possible for a Public Vaccinator to be.”
This evidence of Mr. Davidson is especially important, because it reveals the fact that, as I stated some pages back, neither Public Vaccinators nor ordinary medical men usually know anything of the injurious effects of vaccination, except in such individual cases as may occur in their practice, while all around them there may be a mass of evil results which, when systematically investigated, proves as unexpected as it is startling in its amount.
This brief exposition of medical and official misstatements of facts and figures, always in favour of vaccination, might have been largely increased, but it is already sufficient to demonstrate the position I take, which is, that in this matter of Official and Compulsory Vaccination, both doctors and Government officials, however highly placed, however eminent, however honourable, are yet utterly untrustworthy. Beginning in the early years of the century, and continuing to our own times, we find the most gross and palpable blunders in figures—but always on the side of vaccination—and, on the testimony of medical men themselves, a more or less continuous perversion of the official records of vaccinal injury “in order to save vaccination from reproach.” Let this always be remembered in any discussion of the question. The facts and figures of the medical profession, and of Government officials, in regard to the question of vaccination, must never be accepted without verification. And when we consider that these misstatements, and concealments, and denials of injury, have been going on throughout the whole of the century; that penal legislation has been founded on them; that homes of the poor have been broken up; that thousands have been harried by police and magistrates, have been imprisoned and treated in every way as felons; and that, at the rate now officially admitted, a thousand children have been certainly killed by vaccination during the last twenty years, and an unknown but probably much larger number injured for life, we are driven to the conclusion that those responsible for these reckless misstatements and their terrible results have, thoughtlessly and ignorantly but none the less certainly, been guilty of a crime against liberty, against health, and against humanity, which will, before many years have passed, be universally held to be one of the foulest blots on the civilization of the nineteenth century.[4]