History and Consequences

The history of immunisation is greater and older than Louis Pasteur and Edward Jenna. What we are commonly told about the invention of immunisation is given a rather magical quality as a preventive medicine that worked perfectly from inception and that first smallpox vaccination. Other more detailed information reveals it was not so simple and had many difficulties gaining respect among people and indeed caused outbreaks of disease at times. For centuries druids and other healers have been using the concept of preparing the body for a disease through introducing it gently to a small dose of that disease: however, injection into the bloodstream is a more modern idea.

Diseases come and go in cycles; human intervention may do little to deter them.

From Lindlahr's book Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics, 1918: "In the years 1870-1 smallpox was rampant in Germany. Over one million persons had the disease and 120,000 died. 96% of these had been vaccinated, and only 4% had been so 'protected'. Most of the victims were vaccinated, once at least, shortly before they took the disease. Bismark, the Chancellor of Germany, sent an address to the governments of the various German states, in which it was stated that numerous eczamatous diseases were the result of the vaccination, and that the hopes placed in the efficacy of the cowpox virus as preventative of smallpox have proved entirely deceptive."

It is more likely that good health and hygiene have been the cause of a reduction in disease than vaccination procedures.

Leon Chaitow also includes a passage by George Bernard Shaw in The Nation, 1923: "When its failure to protect for life could no longer be denied, it was alleged to last for seven years (seven is the characteristic number of magic), and re-vaccination was made compulsory in many cases; for instance, persons entering various public services, and, on quarantine, crossing frontiers. The every seven years might have become every seven months, or even days, had not vaccination received its death blow in 1871, when compulsory vaccination was at its height, from the most apalling epidemic of smallpox on record. This was followed by another great epidemic in 1881 in which, by the way, I being a vaccinated person, caught the disease. I was more lucky than my grandfather, who was innoculated, vaccinated, and had smallpox spontaneously as well."

This scenario is very different to that which we were led to believe. My grandmother born 1910 in Australia recounts similar tales of everyone but one chiuld in her family refusing immunisation. Her young brother received a vaccination for diptheria and subsequently became sick with the disease and was admitted to hospital. he later suffered a second bout of it and my grandmother to this day takes a strong stance against immunisation even though she wears a leg iron from the polio she contracted at age 13. People throughout history deal with disease and in response will always try to ward it off: immunisation however may not be the whole solution and not something that works for everyone.