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.
EPIDEMICS ACTUALLY CAUSED BY VACCINATION
That the hypothetical condition suggested in the preceding paragraph, viz., that the wholesale and world-wide vaccine infection going on for the past few years had possibly escaped from its usual bounds and has been overflowing and running wild and thus causing epidemics in mankind, or animals,—that this, I say, may be no mere hypothesis or theory, but rather a hard fact, is proved by the frightful epidemics of “foot and mouth disease” in the United States in 1902, 1908, and 1914, some of which originated from two of the largest vaccine factories in this country, one in Philadelphia and the other in Detroit, and were widely distributed to cattle and mankind in several of our States. See reports of U. S. Bureau of Animal Industry, 1902 and 1908. Also Year Book of U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1914, page 20. See also page 96 in Supplement.
It is clearly shown in these reports that vaccine infection was the direct cause of these epidemics in 1902 and 1908; but the cause of the epidemic of 1914 and 1915 is not so clearly proven, although there is a strong suspicion that it was caused by vaccine infection, like the two others, and, as a matter of fact, it originated in the same State—Michigan—where the epidemic of 1908 originated and where one of the largest vaccine factories in the country is located. See page 98 in Supplement.
These vaccine epidemics caused the destruction of hundreds of thousands of cattle and other domestic animals in over a score of States, at a loss of many millions of dollars to the Government and people of this country. See page 102. Surely, Mr. President, any medical operation so inherently dangerous and capable of inflicting such injury on animals or man should not be forced on any person against conscientious objection or without free will and consent and should not be required by our enlightened democratic Government in our Army or Navy in any form except purely voluntary, like all other medical remedies and operations.
There is an attempt made in some of the official reports to deny that these epidemics of “foot and mouth disease” caused by vaccination could be or were transmitted to mankind in virus and were limited to domestic animals, but this I believe to be a grave mistake, as I have the most convincing evidence that this disease was so transmitted to many human victims, both child and adult, with most awful effects in 1902 and 1908, and is frequently transmitted to mankind in vaccine virus. See Supplement, page 111.
VACCINE FACTORIES A POSSIBLE AND PROVED SOURCE OF EPIDEMICS AND SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED BY CONGRESS AND THE GOVERNMENT
This foot and mouth disease is a horrible eruptive fever, a kind of “cowpox,” or something like a mongrel smallpox and diphtheria combined, or also like a very bad chickenpox, with successive crops of vesicles, blisters or blotches, something like cold sores, large and small, breaking out all over the body, but chiefly on the hoofs, or hands and feet, lips and nostrils, also inside the mouth and throat as is common in smallpox. Sometimes these blotches become confluent and pustular and continue for months, but, usually, the eruption ends in a few weeks in recovery or death. In the worst cases, with internal eruptions and pus infection, affecting vital nerve centers, the end comes in a few days by the victim choking to death from paralysis of the heart and breathing organs like what happens in infant paralysis, rabies and lockjaw. For effects on cattle and mankind, see Figs. 7, 8, 9, 11, 12 and 13 in Supplement.