SMALL-POX EPIDEMICS IN ENGLAND.
We will now come nearer home and take the Metropolitan Asylums Board and their statistics. From 1870 to 1886 there were 53,579 cases of small-pox, and out of that number there were 43,919 who had undergone the process spoken of by Sir John Simon as "removing every taint of susceptibility to infection." But you may say, perhaps, " Will it protect for a time?" ‘Well, I should like to know for how long? (Hear, hear,) Dr. Bond says up to fourteen years, some people say ten; in Birmingham they were rejoicing the other day that they had had nobody take small-pox, no vaccinated child, under three; so that it has got down rather low. (Laughter.) Jenner said that to talk about re-vaccination was to rob his "discovery" of half of its virtues; he was dead against it by the statement he made that one vaccination was protection for a life-time. On that he got £30,000. (Laughter.) Dr. Bond tells us that that was altered afterwards, and that it was not the expression of Jenner’s matured vision. No, Jenner altered it afterwards; he got his £30,000 first, though. (Renewed laughter.) He never yielded up the £30,000 when he found he had made a mistake.
How long will it protect? Dr. Bond talks about the Sheffield epidemic in his letter two or three days ago, and I have no doubt Mr. French Hensley, to whome he replies, will very soon put the matter straight. He tells us that the Sheffield statistics show a wonderful immunity of vaccinated children. Dr. Bond bases that upon the marvellous satistics of Dr. Barry. Dr. Bond has evidently never read the Royal Commission reports at all. (Laughter and cheers.) It looks as thought Dr. Bond has never seen the cross-examination of Dr. Barry. Dr. Bond has no idea of the fatal fallacy underlying the Sheffield epidemic report, which came to an utter collapse when Dr. Barry was cross-examined upon it. He has no idea of all that; he is evidently something like the old lady Sydney Smith talked about, who never read anything on the opposite side of the question in case she should be prejudiced. (Laughter,) If it had not been for the Sheffield report—I am very pleased it was brought forward, although it is a perfectly hollow thing so far as facts go—we should not have had the Royal Commission. The vaccinators thought when it fell into Government quarters that they had such a tremendously strong case that the anti-vaccinators would have been wiped off the scene. But when it came before the Royal Commission, Dr. Collins, one of the Commissioners, took Dr. Barry in hand and very soon spoilt the whole game; and it turned out that the whole of the report, from beginning to end, was nothing but a statistical trick, based upon evidence collected by census collectors towards the close of the epidemic instead of at the beginning, when many of the unvaccinated had passed over to the vaccinated class. (Cheers.) I will give you some statistics with regard to Sheffield as far as one can gather them, which I take out of this very report. There were ten cases of small-pox under one year old, 87 cases under five years of age—vaccinated all of them—and 241 cases of vaccinated small-pox between the ages of five and ten. In spite of what is said about vaccination protecting up to 14 years of age, this splendid report, that Dr. Bond speaks of with such admiration, declares that Dr. Bond’s theory is as false as anything can be, for it gives no less than 338 cases of vaccinated small-pox under ten years of age. (Cheers.)
Well now, let us see what vaccination did for Sheffield. This Sheffield epidemic occurred in 1887 in the very worst quarter of the town, on 135 acres of the most horribly insanitary part of the town, which was condemned years ago by the Government Inspector, and it has never been put right yet. That is where small-pox has always broken out, that is where small-pox has flourished: and when this tremendous epidemic took place on they went, vaccinating and re-vaccinating; and still the small-pox epidemic spread. There were no less than 7,000 cases of small-pox, and, alas! 600 deaths, and still the small-pox went on; until at last God in his mercy opened the floodgate of heaven and down came the rain, which washed the sewers and the drains, cleared away the refuse from the gutters, washed the dirt from the streets and the filth from the slums and away went the small-pox. Pure water accomplished for Sheffield what 56,000 vaccinations had been unable to effect. (Loud cheers.)
Again, take Gayton, a great authority with the pro-vaccinists, who in his book entitled "The Value of Vaccination’ shows that of 10,403 cases of vaccinated small-pox 20 cases were under one year old, 341 between one and five, and 945 between five and ten; i.e., 1,306 cases of small-pox in vaccinated children, in order to prove the efficacy of vaccination.