Smallpox, bedbugs and vitamin C
Smallpox, bedbugs and vitamin C
Many years ago, I read that the early naturopaths conducted public experiments trying to infect themselves with deadly diseases. They claimed that they could not, no matter how much they sprayed their throat with matter from diseased individuals. They said that healthy people who practised good hygiene and ate healthy food, could not get a disease.
I wanted so much to believe this. But I couldn't. There was too strong a chance that they could be faking the experiments. And even if not, how healthy did your lifestyle have to be in order to provide protection? You really can't take chances with anything as deadly as smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, polio and so on, thankfully now wiped out by vaccines.
Except that they weren't.
My cognitive dissonance ended when I read a landmark book on medical history by Suzanne Humphries MD and Roman Bystrianyk, titled "Dissolving Illusions".
The first shock was to find that what every schoolchild learns about the discovery of the smallpox vaccine is absolutely and categorically untrue. Not only is it untrue, it is a lie so monstruous and so harmful, that you will wonder how it survives after more than a century. Here is what really happened.
In 18th century England, it was rumoured among milkmaids that infection with cowpox could stop you getting smallpox. In 1774 a farmer named Benjamin Jesty made scratches on his wife and two sons using a darning needle, then rubbed into them pus from a cow infected with cowpox. Later on, when Jesty’s sons were deliberately exposed to smallpox, they did not catch the disease.
In 1796, Edward Jenner, a country apothecary with a Degree of Medicine purchased from St. Andrew's University for the sum of £15, came to hear of this, and repeated the experiment with an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps. When the boy did not develop smallpox, Jenner published a paper claiming that his method conferred lifelong immunity to smallpox. Needless to say, the medical community was very excited, despite the paucity of research.
Dr. Woodville, director of the Smallpox Inoculation Hospital in London, began extensive testing of cowpox inoculation. After these tests he warned, "In several instances, the cowpox has proved a very severe disease. In three or four cases out of 500, the patient has been in considerable danger, and one child actually died."
The medical community continued to embrace Jenner’s vaccine, despite numerous cases of individuals who still died of smallpox after having had natural cowpox or being vaccinated with cowpox.
In 1809, the Medical Observer reported a series of cases demonstrating the failure of either natural cowpox or vaccination to protect from smallpox:
Just like today, doctors were paid well to perform vaccination. It was a new form of income for them. Despite this, many doctors wrote to medical journals about the vaccine’s ineffectiveness. But just like today, both the medical dissidents and the people who had lost loved ones after vaccination, were ignored.
Still, by 1840 vaccine refusals were increasing, so Governments passed laws to force people to be vaccinated. Vaccination was made compulsory in England in 1853. Fines or imprisonment were the punishment for non-compliance. In 1855 the state of Massachusetts in the USA passed a law which required parents or guardians to cause the vaccination of all children before they were two years old, and forbade admission to public schools of any child who had not been vaccinated.
Compulsory vaccination laws did nothing to curb smallpox. In fact, more people were dying from smallpox. Following the 1855 mandates in Boston, there were smallpox epidemics in 1859–1860, 1864–1865, and 1867, culminating with the infamous epidemic in 1872–1873. From 1870-71, a smallpox pandemic swept through Europe's highly-vaccinated populations.
The Leicester anti-vaxxers
Many citizens had had enough of the vaccine, but the British government met their protests with tyranny, appointing vaccination officers to impose fines and imprisonment on anti-vaxxers. People's property was seized if they could not pay the fines. The town of Leicester in England suffered more than 1,100 prosecutions in 1881 alone. In 1885 the people of Leicester mounted a large demonstration against compulsory vaccination. It drew participants from all over the country, and letters of sympathy from the citizens of many other countries. Leicester soon acquired a local government that was opposed to compulsory vaccination, and by 1887 the vaccination uptake rate in Leicester had dropped to 10 percent. People had begun asking whether better sanitation, hygiene, improved housing, nutrition, and isolation of cases were the best ways to deal with smallpox. Leicester began to use this approach to combat the disease, and it became known as the Leicester Method.
The Leicester Method was very successful. During the 1892–1894 smallpox outbreak, the death rate per hundred thousand in Leicester was 5.7, compared with 10.0 in Warrington, and 14.4 in Middlesbrough. By the time of the 1903–1904 outbreak, the Leicester death rate was down to only 1.2 per hundred thousand. But still it was not until 1948 that compulsory vaccination in England came to an end.
Life expectancy was worse, not better
Contrary to popular belief, smallpox was not eradicated by mass vaccination. Decades of strict vaccination laws did absolutely nothing to improve overall life expectancy. In fact, the enforcement of the compulsory smallpox vaccination law in England in 1867, was accompanied by an increase in the death rate from smallpox, from 100 to 400 deaths per million. Prior to this law, the death rate had been falling, not rising.
The fact that the smallpox vaccination was unnecessary and had caused so much needless suffering and death, was never recognized or acknowledged. In fact, despite all the serious problems with it and the lack of evidence of effectiveness, it is still upheld as the exemplary vaccine to promote vaccine faith today.
You can find more details, including the harm done by many other vaccines, in the Dissolving Illusions book. I have just given a few summaries and extracts from the book. The true heartbreaking extent of the harm and death from the smallpox vaccines needs to be known by everyone.
What causes smallpox?
This may seem to be a strange question, since we are all taught that the cause of the disease is a viral infection. But not all doctors agree. In fact a growing number of doctors are even disputing the existence of viruses. My article archives include an explanation of their reasons, but this book is more comprehensive: The Contagion Myth: Why Viruses (Including "Coronavirus") Are Not the Cause of Disease, Thomas S. Cowan, Sally Fallon Morell.
If a virus doesn’t cause smallpox, what possible alternative explanations might there be?
In the early 20th century, Dr Charles A R Campbell of San Antonio, Texas, a bacteriologist and Nobel Prize nominee, was intrigued by the possibility that since malaria and yellow fever were spread by mosquitoes, perhaps smallpox was also spread by an insect. After many experiments, he discovered that the