THE FRAUD OF VACCINATION

Dr. Hadwen‘s First Article. From "Truth," January 3, 1923.

Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace in his book The Wonderful Century, devoted a chapter to "Vaccination, a Delusion"; Dr. Charles Creighton, an acknowledged authority on epidemiology, declared independently that "the bottom had been knocked out of a grotesque superstition," a conclusion irresistibly forced upon anybody who gives unbiased study to the subject. Yet so strong is the effect- of authority, custom, and endowment, and so prone are people to save themselves the trouble of personal investigation by the simple process of accepting the decisions of "the majority" (which they thereby swell, rendering the process easier to others), that it has been possible, within the last few weeks, for a gigantic scare to be got up in the interests of vaccination on the ground of an altogether insignificant outbreak of smallpox almost entirely confined to one East End workhouse, where the Public Vaccinator himself was one of the first to fall a prey to the disease.

One well-known daily paper, not a household word for accuracy, committed itself to the ludicrous statement that two of the adult patients, having been protected by vaccination in infancy, thereby secured a mild attack, ignoring the fact that vaccination in infancy had not prevented the actual death of others. Jenner declared positively that a primary vaccination protected for life, and his followers, while obliged to drop this claim (for which piece of unsupported bombast be received £30,000), have fallen back upon the theory that it at least mitigates the disease. Evidently these have been "mitigated"-deaths.