Vaccination vindicated : being an answer to the leading anti-vaccinators / by John C. McVail.
- John McVail
- Date:
- 1887
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Vaccination vindicated : being an answer to the leading anti-vaccinators / by John C. McVail. Source: Wellcome Collection.
19/214
![Mr. P. A. Taylor, M.P., wanted, on the contrary, to minimise the effect of the compulsory law of 1853 by showing that the period, 1841-53, had had a low mortality. Hence he speaks of the four years, 1843-46, which, I believe, are known to have been low in small-pox mortality.* Thus the blank space can have written into it whatever an opponent of vaccination may desire, while ordinary mortals are content to accept the official statement that in these years the causes of death were not distinguished. Returning to Dr. Wallace] : As to the trustworthiness of the Registrar-General's statistics, no reasonable being can have any doubt. But, on occasion arising, anti-vaccinators have no hesitation in describing these returns, on which Dr. Wallace relies, as imperfect and unreliable.! And though the doctor himself, to uphold the value of his statistical data, maintains the accuracy and assumes the truthfulness of medical men in recording small-pox deaths (p. 26), he utterly denies them (p. 27) the possession of these qualities if they record on the same certifi- cates an absence or doubtfulness of vaccination—in this matter the reports of the Registrar-General are often erroneous. While the doctor can thus at one time freely reject the statements of those whose word he at another time as freely accepts, I have further to show that at times he can place unlimited faith in the statistics of last century, which, as a rule, he so strenuously refuses to hear of. He says (pp. 3, 4), I propose now to establish the following four statements of fact, by means of the only official statistics which are available. These statements are— (1) That during the forty-five years of the registration of deaths and their causes, small-pox mortality has very slightly diminished, while an exceedingly severe small-pox epidemic occurred within the last twelve years of the period. (2) That there is no evidence to show that the slight decrease of small-pox mortality is due to vaccination. (3) That the severity of small-pox as a disease has not been mitigated by vaccination. (4) That several inoculable diseases have increased to an alarm- ing extent coincidently with enforced vaccination. Now observe what follows :— The first, second, and fourth propositions will be proved from the Registrar-General's Reports from 1838 to 1882. But what has become of the third ? On turning to * Current Fallacies about Vaccination : A Letter to Dr. W. B. Carpenter (Lon- don, E. W. Allen, 1881). t Vaccination Tracts, London, 1877, No. 9, p. 6.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20395243_0019.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
