There is one Government Report on vaccination in the Philippine
Islands, which is often quoted by vaccinators to show the utter
harmlessness of vaccination, which claims that from three to five
millions of vaccinations have been performed on the population of the
Philippines, _without a single injury or death_! Now, this reckless
report might be made correct if slightly amended by the Goddess of
Truth to read as follows: “Three to five millions vaccinated without a
single injury or death”--_which has ever been honestly acknowledged_!
It is, of course, shamefully false on its face to say that three to
five millions of vaccinations were ever inflicted in the Philippines
or anywhere else without any injuries or deaths; and the mind which
can accept such a statement without a big logical and moral squirm
does not understand the real nature of vaccination, the facts of vital
statistics, or the first principles of mere mathematical chances,
proportions and probabilities, as I will now show.
In the first place, a million is such a gigantic number that any person
who has any disrespect for or trifles with it is not fit to discuss
this subject. For example: if a man were to live for a million days he
would have to be about three thousand years old! Whereas the average
life of a man is much less than fifty years or about one-sixtieth of
a million days! Now, if a man were to subject himself for the whole
average lifetime of fifty years, or one-sixtieth of a million days,
to the ordinary, benign, and necessary conditions of breathing air,
drinking water and milk and eating food, he could not possibly do
this without at some time contracting some disease and possible death
from these perfectly normal, necessary, and benign conditions of
breathing, eating and drinking, as most of our diseases and infections
are admittedly contracted through these three benign sources! Yet our
Government-trifler in millions wants us to believe that you could
inflict on the human body--millions of times--not a purely benign
action, but the purely and doubly malign act of vaccination, which
consists in first wounding the body and then injecting into this wound
a virulent septicemic infection, without causing a single injury or
death! In other words, the doubly malign act--wounding and infecting
the human body with a complex pus infection--is utterly harmless and
less injurious than the purely benign acts of breathing, eating and
drinking, which demonstrably cannot be practised for one-sixtieth of a
million days by any human being without a possible serious injury or
death!
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.