"So what about smallpox?", they ask
The history is not that comfortable.
The political authorities have a new scapegoat, the “antivaxxers” who are spreading dangerous “misinformation”.
But what exactly is vaccine misinformation and why are they so scared of it? Vaccine skepticism dates back all the way to the first smallpox vaccines and one prominent skeptic at the time was Alfred Russel Wallace, a co-discoverer of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) is credited with Charles Darwin as a co-discoverer of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Less known is Wallace’s critique against Smallpox Vaccination.
Despite himself and his children being vaccinated, Wallace became skeptical of the claims of the medical establishment and believed that they misled themselves.
Wallace argued that the problem of determining vaccination status was serious and undermined the claims of his opponents. He asserted that the physicians’ belief in the efficacy of vaccination led to a bias in categorizing persons on the basis of interpretation of true or false vaccination scars.
To understand Wallace’s critique we need to take a look at the timeline leading up to the Leicester Anti-Vaccination Rebellion in Victorian England.
1853 - New Vaccination Act makes vaccination compulsory in the first three months of a child's life
1867 - Vaccinations compulsory for all children below 14
1869 - Leicester Anti-Vaccination League founded
1885 - Mass protest held in Leicester
1898 - Vaccination Act introduces "conscientious objection" clause
In 1885 after mass protest against mandatory vaccination, the Leicester Townsfolk replaced their government with a new one that enacted a health board who favoured a program of healthy food, focused protection and quarantining the sick. Despite being voluntary, vaccine skepticism was high, given the high rate of adverse reactions that children received from a smallpox inoculation1.
In the years following the rebellion, childhood vaccination rates dropped to a dangerously low rate of less than 1% over a 5 year period and therefore Leicester served as the perfect control group, an irresponsible Victorian English population that ignored “the science”.
In Wallace’s submission to the British Parliament he showed that despite this drop in childhood vaccination, smallpox deaths actually went down - contrary to the predictions of death and despair.
He concluded that the procedure was “useless” and “dangerous”.
I appeal from the medical and official apologists of Vaccination to the intelligence and common sense of my fellow-countrymen, and I urge them to insist upon the immediate abolition of all legislation enforcing or supporting this useless and dangerous operation.
Was Alfred Wallace wrong, was he spreading “misinformation” or was he so accurate that he was dangerous to the authorities?
Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History by Suzanne Humphries MD and Roman Bystrianyk