Here is surely the “reductio ad absurdum” which shows that such a reckless statement of the harmlessness of vaccination by the millions is, of course, a stupid and shameful medical falsehood on its face and is pretty close to being a medical crime on the people, as any honest doctor or intelligent layman must know who has given any serious consideration to this subject, or who has any idea of what vaccination is, or who knows anything of disease infections, vital statistics and the laws of mere mathematical chances and probabilities.
Indeed, every competent doctor knows that you could not subject the human body to a mere pin scratch for a million times without causing several serious injuries or possible deaths from resulting infections. And every competent doctor and student of vital statistics knows also that there are actually more deaths caused every year by mere pin scratches and trifling cuts, wounds and abrasions, resulting in lockjaw, septicemia, erysipelas and other infections than from the dreaded smallpox itself.
Is it not, therefore, rather strange, Mr. President, that vaccination should be reported as so utterly harmless in the distant Philippines, where we can not easily get at the records, when we know it is so deadly in the near-by England and America, where the accessible records show that it causes, frequently, more deaths than smallpox, as I have already proved? For example: the great English Commission on Vaccination found that deaths from vaccination were sometimes as high as seventy deaths per million vaccinated. This is twice as high as the mortality from smallpox in the United States, which for five years, from 1901 to 1905, including our last great epidemic period of 1901 and 1902, averaged only thirty-four deaths per million population! See U. S. Mortality Statistics for 1907, page 40. The Reports of the Registrar General of England for 1906, 1907 and 1908 give a death-rate from infantile vaccination in those years which runs as high as forty-two deaths per million children vaccinated! Here we see that, according to some of our highest statistical authorities, vaccination is not harmless, but is so very harmful that its ratio of mortality per million vaccinated is sometimes twice as great as the ratio of smallpox mortality per million population, and including an epidemic period!
We therefore think, Mr. President, that these points and facts make sufficient answer to, and refutation of, the shocking medical lie that vaccination is perfectly harmless, and, per contra, prove that general vaccination is actually more dangerous to public health and human life to-day than natural smallpox, just as that great medical blunder of a past century—smallpox inoculation—was proved to be more dangerous than the natural disease and was finally prohibited by penal law. And I feel sure that compulsory vaccination will follow the same course and be legally prohibited for the same reason in the present century.
HEALTH DEPARTMENT FALSEHOODS
As a lifelong student of this subject I have become convinced that the whole cult and practice of general public vaccination and particularly all compulsory vaccination, like all great intrenched evils, has originated in falsehood, has continued in falsehood, and now exists on both falsehood and concealment, viz.: falsehood as to its absolute efficiency and certainty in protecting the individual against smallpox; falsehood as to the necessity of general vaccination to prevent smallpox epidemics; and gross falsehood as to its perfect safety and freedom from danger to human health and life.
Now, I do not think that I have ever seen a grosser illustration of the truth of this charge than can be found in the special article on Vaccination published in the Monthly Bulletin or Health News for February, 1914, issued by the New York State Department of Health at Albany, which contains what I believe to be shocking falsehoods, fallacies, and exaggerations which even a tyro in the investigation of this subject could easily refute, as I will now show. All these fallacies have been issued with an air of gospel truth, to instruct the public, and to try to justify the extreme efforts of our department officers and medical doctors to force compulsory vaccination on every child and adult in this State as not only absolutely necessary for public health, but as the only known means to prevent smallpox epidemics, and as being an operation which is wholly beneficial and entirely safe and harmless to human health and life. I shall now give examples of the chief and worst of these medical falsehoods and follow with their refutation, as a duty clearly due to public truth and right.
First Falsehood: This official Bulletin at page 48 tells us concerning the alleged efficiency and necessity of vaccination as follows:
“Nothing but vaccination can save from smallpox.... Cleanliness and general sanitation exert absolutely no influence upon its prevalence.”
This is about as shocking, absurd and false as it can be, and coming from our highest State health officer is certainly not creditable to our public health service, but is so obviously absurd and untenable as to refute itself on its very face. This paragraph tells us, in effect, that dense human overcrowding, with personal and public filth spread everywhere, no sanitation or isolation anywhere, and every case of smallpox left loose and at large to spread by direct contact to every child and adult and thus infect every one right and left, as in the old unsanitary times of big and frequent epidemics—all this, our Health Commissioner coolly tells us, would not make a bit of difference in the spread of the disease! And, per contra, the prevention of all these vile unsanitary conditions of barbarous times, with or without vaccination, would have no effect whatever to reduce the disease!