In this message to the various legislatures the great statesman said: "The hopes placed in the efficacy of the cowpox virus as a preventive of smallpox have proved entirely deceptive."
Realizing this to be a fact, most of the German governments have modified or entirely relinquished their compulsory vaccination laws.
"But," our opponents insist, "you cannot deny that smallpox has greatly diminished since the almost universal adoption of vaccination."
Certainly the disease has diminished. But so have diminished and, in fact, nearly disappeared the plague, the Black Death, cholera, the bubonic plague, yellow fever and numerous other epidemic pests which only recently decimated entire nations.
Not one of these epidemics was treated by vaccination. Why, then, did they abate and practically disappear?
Not vaccination, but the more universal adoption of soap, bathtubs, all kinds of sanitary measures, such as plumbing, drainage, ventilation and more hygienic modes of living generally have subdued smallpox as well as all other plagues.
Many of us remember how the yellow fever raged in Havanna during the Spanish occupancy. Within two months after the energetic Yankees took possession and gave the filthy city a good scouring, yellow fever had entirely disappeared—without any yellow fever vaccination.
The question is now in order why, of all the dreaded plagues of the past, smallpox alone survives to this day.
The answer is: on account of vaccination. If scrofulous and syphilitic poisons were not artificially kept alive in human blood by vaccination, smallpox would by this time be as rare as cholera and yellow fever.
Thanks to the oft-repeated compulsory vaccination of every citizen, young and old, we as a nation have become saturated with the smallpox virus. Is it any wonder that every once in a while this latent taint breaks out in acute epidemics?