Vaccination a delusion : its penal enforcement a crime, proved by the official evidence in the reports of the Royal Commission / by Alfred Russel Wallace.

  • Wallace, Alfred Russel, 1823-1913.
Date:
1898
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vaccination a delusion : its penal enforcement a crime, proved by the official evidence in the reports of the Royal Commission / by Alfred Russel Wallace. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    the un vaccina ted now than then, the greatly diminished or almost vanishing effect of primary vaccination in adults cannot possibly have reduced their fatality to one-fifth or one-sixth of that of the other class. Again, it is admitted by many pro-vaccinist authori- ties that the un vaccinated, as a rule, belong to the poorer classes, while they also include most of the criminal classes, tramps, and generally the nomad popu- lation. They also include all those children whose vaccination has been deferred on account of weakness, or of their suffering from other diseases, as well as all those under vaccination age. The unvaccinated as a class are therefore especially liable to zymotic disease of any kind, small-pox included ; and when, in addition to these causes of a higher death-rate from small-pox, we take account of the proved untrustworthiness of the statistics, wholly furnished by men who are prejudiced in favour of vaccination (as instanced by the declaration of Dr. Gay ton, that when the eruption is so severe as on the third day to hide the vaccination marks, it affords primti facie evidence of non-vaccination (2nd Re- port, Q. 1790), we are fully justified in rejecting all argu- ments in favour of vaccination supported by such fallacious evidence. And this is the more rational course to be adopted by all unprejudiced enquirers, be- cause, as I shall now proceed to show, there is an abun- dance of facts of a more accurate and more satisfactory nature by which to test the question.1 One more point may be referred to before quitting this part of the subject, which is, that the more recent official hospital-statistics themselves afford a demonstration of the non-protective influence of vaccination, and thus 1 The same view is taken even by some advocates of vaccina- tion in Germany. In an account of the German Commission for the Consideration of the Vaccination Question in the British Medical Journal, August 29,1885 (p. 408), we find it stated : In the view of Dr. Koch, no other statistical material than the mortality from small-pox can be relied upon; questions as to the vaccinated or unvaccinated condition of the patient leaving too much room for error.