Dear Sir: I thank you very much for your kind letter of Oct. 7th, giving me particulars as to the death of your two precious little boys from lockjaw caused by vaccination, and I hardly know how to express my horror at this misfortune and my sympathy with you in what, as you say, was an “entirely unnecessary operation forced upon the people”: but I have now determined, from a knowledge of a large number of cases like yours, which are occurring all over the country, to do everything I can for the balance of my life to bring about the repeal and prohibition of all compulsory vaccination in every shape and form as nothing less than a medical crime on the people. Within the last week three children have been killed in our own city from this evil.
I have spent fully twenty-five thousand dollars in the last year in a newspaper campaign in our State to enlighten the people as to the great falsehoods and fatalities of compulsory vaccination and to bring about the repeal of the law, but the medical powers in the State, which profit by vaccination, had too much influence in the legislature and the law was only slightly altered, so as to take compulsory vaccination off the country districts and put it stronger on the ten large cities in the State where the enforcement of the law will be more profitable to the vaccinators. This new law is, however, so bad and illegal that I think it can be easily invalidated in our courts, and I shall continue to fight it until it is completely removed from our statute books as one of the greatest outrages on children ever committed by man.
I believe that a special act should be passed by our legislatures to indemnify all parents whose children have been killed by these dangerous and unnecessary medical operations forced upon the people by an unwise law, and I will endeavor to have such an act introduced in our State at the next session of our legislature and would suggest that you propose a similar law in your own State.
(Signed) Chas. M. Higgins.
Brooklyn, N. Y., Oct. 14, 1915.
LETTER FROM AN AGGRIEVED FATHER ON THE DEATH OF HIS LITTLE BOY FROM VACCINATION
4913 Church Avenue, Flatbush,
Brooklyn, N. Y., July 27, 1915.
Hon. Elihu Root,
President Constitutional Convention,
Albany, N. Y.
Sir:
On October 16, 1914, I was compelled by the Board of Education of New York to have my son, Chester Stanley Waters, vaccinated as a condition to enter school.