By Gary Krasner
October 22, 2001
The public is now getting lot’s of medical propaganda about the eradication of smallpox through vaccination. But in fact, the consensus among leading medical historians that have studied the question have concluded that the eradication of the zymotic, or “filth” diseases, like cholera, dysentary, typhus, plague, in the past that are popularly attributed to mass vaccination campaigns, had actually been due to improvements in diet, hygiene, sanitary measures, non-medical public health laws, and to a host of new non-medical technologies, like refrigeration, faster transportation, and the like (McKinlay, 1977; McKeown, 1979; Moberg & Cohen, 1991; Oppenheimer, 1992; Dubos, 1959).
The CDC reported (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, July 30, 1999, 48:621-628) that improvements in sanitation, water quality, hygiene, had been the most important factors in control of infectious diseases in the past century. Although vaccines were mentioned, they were not included among the major factors.
One of the conclusions in Thomas McKeown’s seminal work, “The Modern Rise Of Populations” (1976, also endorsed by a Lancet editorial, 2/1/75), was that the decline in mortality in the 18th and 19th centuries was essentially due to the reduction in deaths from infectious diseases, and that it was not the result of immunizations. Similar studies by scholars John & Sonia McKinlay (1977) shows that almost all the increase in human lifespan since the year 1900 is due to reductions in infectious disease, with medical intervention (of all kinds) accounting for only about 3 per cent of that reduction. According to World Health Statistics Annual, 1973-76, vol.2, “there has been a steady decline of infectious diseases in most developing countries regardless of the percentage of immunizations administered in these countries.”
Before health agencies and schools of public health were completely taken over by allopathic medicine, the great legacy of the sanitary reformers—Max von Penttenkofer, James T. Briggs, Dr. John Snow, Edwin Chadwick, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Southwood Smith—was that they were able to eradicate cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid, scarlet fever, diptheria, whooping cough, measles and the bubonic plague long before vaccinations were developed or routinely used.
Not only had poor sanitation and nutrition lay the foundation for disease, it was also compulsory smallpox vaccination campaigns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that played a major role in decimating the populations of Japan (48,000 deaths), England & Wales (44,840 deaths, after 97 per cent of the population had been vaccinated), Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Holland, Italy, India (3 million—all vaccinated), Australia, Germany (124,000 deaths), Prussia (69,000 deaths—all revaccinated), and the Philippines. The epidemics ended in cities where smallpox vaccinations were either discontinued or never begun, and also after sanitary reforms were instituted (Most notably in Munich-1880, Leicester-1878, Barcelona-1804, Alicante-1827, India-1906, etc.).
In many nations, mortalities from smallpox hadn’t begun to decline until the citizenry revolted against compulsory smallpox vaccination laws. For example, the town of Leicester from 1878 to 1898 stood in stark contrast to the rest of England where thousands were dying from the aggressive half century-old government mandatory immunization campaigns.
By 1907, the Vaccination Acts of England were repealed, with the help of some of the world’s preeminent scientists who had turned staunchly against vaccination: Alfred Russel Wallace (one of the founders of modern evolutionary biology and zoogeography, and co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the Theory of Natural selection), Charles Creighton (Britain’s most learned epidemiologist and medical historian), William Farr (epidemiologist and medical statistician, first to describe how seasonal epidemics rise and fall—known today as Farr’s Law”), and the renowned Dr. Edgar M. Crookshank, Professor of Bacteriology and Comparative Pathology in King’s College, London, and author of the scathing scientific critique of vaccination, The History and Pathology of Vaccination (1889). But before the law was amended in 1898 to include a conscientious exemption clause, an average of 2,000 parents per year were jailed and prosecuted—some repeatedly—for resisting vaccination. Large numbers went to prison in default of paying fines. Hundreds had their homes and possessions seized.
By 1919, England and Wales had become one of the least vaccinated countries, and had only 28 deaths from smallpox, out of a population of 37.8 million people. By contrast, during that same year, out of a population of 10 million—all triply vaccinated over the prior 6 years—the Philippine Islands registered 47,368 deaths from smallpox. The epidemic came after the culmination of a ruthless 15-year compulsory vaccination campaign by the U.S., in which the native population—young and old— were forcibly vaccinated (several times), literally against their will. In a speech condemning the smallpox vaccine reprinted in the Congressional Record of 12/21/37, William Howard Hay, M.D. said, “ . . . the Philippines suffered the worst attack of smallpox, the worst epidemic three times over, that had ever occurred in the history of the islands, and it was almost three times as fatal. The death rate ran as high as 60 per cent in certain areas, where formerly it had been 10 and 15 per cent.” In the province of Rizal, for example, smallpox mortalities increased from an average 3 per cent (before vaccination) to 67 per cent during 1918 and 1919. All told, after 10 years (1911-1920) of a compulsory U.S. program which administered 25 million vaccinations to the Philippine population of 10 million, there had been 170,000 cases, and more than 75,000 deaths from smallpox.
Inducing the public to clamour for smallpox vaccines for every American will lead to a repeat of the aforementioned tragic events. In many additional examples, cases the sickness, injuries and deaths commonly attributed to the microbe were actually due, wholly or in part, to the poisoning effects of vaccination campaigns: from the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-19 that killed 20 million following the administration of anti-typhoid inoculations, to the 1976 Swine flu “epidemic” (among hogs!) that permanently crippled a “meager” few thousand Americans with Guillain-Barré syndrome following an ill-advised national vaccination program. Paralytic diseases have been recorded hundreds of years ago. But epidemic numbers hadn’t appeared until the latter part of the 19th century, right after compulsory smallpox vaccination was instituted.
Reprinted with permission of the author.
“If humanity is to pass safely through its present crisis on earth, it willbe because a majority of individuals are now doing their own thinking”.
–Buckminster Fuller
