vaccinated Ireland (p. 65)! Another and still more striking comparison is given. The town of Leicester is, and has been for the last twenty years, the least vaccinated town in the kingdom. Its average population from 1873 to 1894 was about two-thirds that of the Army during the same period. Yet the small-pox deaths in the Army and Navy were thirty-seven per million, those of Leicester under fifteen per million.
Thus, whether we compare the revaccinated and thoroughly "protected " Army and Navy with imperfectly vaccinated Ireland, or with almost unvaccinated Leicester, we find them either on a bare equality or worse off as regards small-pox mortality. It is not possible to have a more complete or crucial test than this is, and it absolutely demonstrates the utter uselessness, or worse than uselessness, of revaccination![1]
In the face of this clear and indisputable evidence, all recorded in their own Reports, the Commissioners make the astounding statement: " We find that particular classes within the community amongst whom revaccination has prevailed to an exceptional degree have exhibited a position of quite exceptional advantage in relation to small-pox, although these classes have in many cases been subject to exceptional risk of contagion " (Final Report, p. 90, par. 342). And again: " The fact that revaccination of adults appears to place them in so favourable a condition as compared with the un vaccinated," etc. (Final Report, p. 98, sec. 375). What can be said of such statements as these, but simply that they are wholly untrue. And the fact that the majority of the Commissioners did not know this, because they never compared the different groups of facts in their own reports which prove them to be untrue, demonstrates at once their complete
- ↑ So late as 1892 (Jan. 16) the Lancet declared in a leading article: " No one need die of small-pox; indeed, no one need have it unless he likes—that is to say, he can be absolutely-protected by vaccination once repeated." Surely, never before was misstatement so ignorantly promulgated, or so completely refuted!
