Vaccination and the eradication of disease: Smallpox

I don't plan to spend a lot of time on specific critiques of modern medicine but the subject just won't go away. The issue of vaccinations resurfaced for me a few weeks ago because my daughter, who had our grandchildren vaccinated for all but the Hep B vaccine recommended to be given soon after birth, but who had chosen not to go ahead with the MMR vaccine at 12-15 months, was again thinking of vaccinating them (with the MMR vaccine) since she thought they would now be strong enough to withstand the potential (and horryfying) side effects. In discussing it with a couple of people who strongly oppose SOME vaccines, such as the infamous MMR vaccine (on the grounds of their potential devestating side effects, including autism), I was staggered to find that both people in question (people who are almost as critical of modern medicine as I am) support the general concept of vaccinating babies and young chidren on identical grounds, namely that, without mass vaccination, there would be widespread disease, as there once had been and that many people would die as a result. Both people cited (what I regard as) the myth that it was mass vaccinations that were responsible for the eradication of contagious diseases. Both cited the example of smallpox. I wrote an article about this issue in the February 2004 Journal (http://www.consciouslivingseminars.com; see also, March 2004) and don't want to go over old ground. However, the history of smallpox and its alleged eradication through vaccination is worth summarising because it is an example of why it is so difficult for any of us to become or to remain conscious (see the last two posts on what I mean by the word "conscious"). The history we were all taught at school - in my case beginning 50 years ago - and which is still taught in books like Roy Porter's 1997 book, is a myth (Roy Porter, "The greatest benefit to mankind: A medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present". London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997). What really happened?

Porter himself, whose close association with the Wellcome Institute (where he was professor for the social history of medicine) is relevant to the kind of "history" he has written , began with the stuff we were all taught: "The one eighteenth-century improvement in practical medicine which decisively saved lives was the introduction first of inoculation and then of vaccination against smallpox" [(Page 274). See also "Obituary", in Guardian Weekly, 14-20 March, 2002; Porter, who had been born 31 December 1946, died on 4 March 2002]. The smallpox, Porter tells us - that "speckled monster" - had become virulent throughout Europe, "responsible in bad years for perhaps a tenth of all deaths", apparently killing both Queen Mary of England and Louis XV of France (whose date of ascension to the French throne he manages to get wrong). There had already long been an "awareness of the immunizing properties of an attack", Porter writes and, during the 18th century, more and more people began the practice of "inoculation", a procedure he does not describe precisely and which he uses interchangeably with "variolation", again without defining precisely what the word meant. As he tells it, however, it seems to have involved inducing a mild dose of smallpox by deliberately infecting people with it "so as to confer lifelong protection without pock-marking" (Page275). Hundreds of thousands of people are said to have been inoculated in England alone and the practice apparently soon spread to France, where the "philosophes" were attracted to it, as well as to Prussia, Russia and Austria (Porter, 1997:276). However, in spite of such famous royals as Catherine the Great being inoculated, the practice was slow to catch on, Porter writes, because of a "mixture of medical, moral and religious misgivings (there was some resistance from Calvinists in Scotland, who feared that inoculations interfered with Divine Providence)".

Into this scene stepped Edward Jenner(1749-1823). "Jenner learned that among the countryfolk in his native Gloucestershire it was known that cowpox, a cattle disease occasionally contracted by humans, particularly dairymaids, conferred immunity against smallpox"(Page 276). The beauty of it all was that, in humans, cowpox was benign. So, on 14 May 1796, he inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with some matter taken from the cowpox pustule of a dairymaid, Sarah Nelmes. The boy developed a slight fever from which he soon recovered. Six weeks later, Jenner inoculated him with smallpox virus. The inoculation "did not take", writes Porter, clearly demonstrating to both Jenner's and Porter's minds, that Jenner's "surmise" had been correct (viz that the boy was immune to smallpox). In 1798 Jenner published his account in "An inquiry into the causes and effects of the variolae vaccinae, or cow-pox" (republished in 1996, by Prometheus Books, under the title "Vaccination against smallpox", Pages 11-40). It proved immensely popular, with a second and then a third edition coming out by 1801. An American edition came out in 1802 and German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin translations followed in 1803. By 1799, 5000 individuals had been vaccinated in England (where it eventually became compulsory in 1853). Vaccination against smallpox became mandatory in Bavaria in 1807 and Denmark in 1810. Other states, provinces and countries soon followed suit. Prussia made vaccination against smallpox compulsory in 1834. In virtually all books on the subject, including Porter's, the practice of mass vaccination is credited with the eventual disappearance of smallpox, more than a century and a half later.

This view has so thoroughly been taught to us, in schools, universities and government health publications, as well as by the mass media and other forms of mass advertising, that it comes as a shock - but to many as simply unbelievable - to find that there were massive smallpox epidemics and hundreds of thousands of deaths amongst vaccinated populations throughout the 19th century and that, as a result, throughout the 19th and early 20th century there were many in the scientific (especially the medical) community who opposed vaccination vigorously, publicly and politically (eg through Parliament). One of the best-known (at the time, that is, since he has been conveniently erased from our consciousness since his death in 1913) was Alfred Russel Wallace, contemporary of Charles Darwin, who put forward the theory of evolution through natural selection made famous by Darwin at the same time as Darwin (their papers on the subject were read at the same time in the Royal Society in 1858, the year before Darwin's "The origin of species" was published). Wallace was a virulent anti vaccinationist and in 1885 published a thirty-eight page pamphlet addressed to Members of Parliament and entitled "Forty-five years of registration statistics, proving vaccination to be both useless and dangerous". When the Royal Commission Report into vaccination came out, after some six years, Wallace mercilessly criticised it in an 1898 book called "Vaccination a delusion, its penal enforcement a crime, proved by the official evidence in the Reports of the Royal Commission". [See the entire book at: (http://www.whale.to/vaccine/wallace/book.html)]. [See also Eleanor Mcbean's book: http://www.whale.to/a/mcbean6.html]

Being the sort of meticulous researcher and scientist he was, Wallace did what nobody else was prepared to do - he went through ALL the figures on births, deaths, vaccination rates, disease morbidity and mortality and other demographics published by various government agencies, hospitals and registries, as well as the entire Report of the Royal Commision and, more important, the transcript of the evidence on which the Report was based. Then, rather than accepting the conclusions the Commission came to, Wallace drew the conclusions that the figures actually logically led to. Wallace's analysis is an amazing document, as one would expect from a scientist of his standing. It is surely no accident that this work is practically unknown and that, while Darwin's name is known to everyone, Wallace has become virtually unknown.

I can not possibly do justice either to the 1885 pamphlet or the 1898 book, so I will just pick out the most important findings and conclusions (readers are urged to read this invaluable document for themselves, especially those who believe that vaccination against smallpox was in any way responsible for its eradication). [To be continued]