History doesn't repeat but it rhymes. (From 'Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History')

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These reports from chapter 4 sound oh so familiar. The only difference being, they are from roundabout 200 years ago.

The deeper I delve into this book, the more obvious the scam becomes. What I didn't know was how useless Jenner's cowpox vax really was for smallpox.

And the part about the milder disease sounds exactly like what we were told two years ago.

In 1829 William Cobbett, a farmer, journalist, and English pamphleteer, wrote about the failure of vaccination to protect people from smallpox. Cobbett considered vaccination to be an unproven and a fraudulent medical practice. His reference to 20,000 pounds no doubt refers to the monetary amount the British government had advanced to Edward Jenner in 1822 for further smallpox vaccine experimentation. In the midst of all this mad work, to which the doctors, after having found it in vain to resist, had yielded, the real smallpox, in its worst form, broke out in the town of Ringwood, in Hampshire, and carried off, I believe, more than a hundred persons, young and old, every one of whom had had the cow-pox “so nicely!” And what was now said? Was the quackery exploded, and the granters of the twenty thousand pounds ashamed of what they had done? Not at all: the failure was imputed to unskillful operators; to the staleness of the matter; to its not being of genuine quality… what do we know now? Why, that in hundreds of instances, persons cowpoxed by JENNER HIMSELF [William Cobbett’s capital emphasis], have taken the real smallpox afterwards, and have either died from the disorder, or narrowly escaped with their lives!

Vaccination makes for milder disease?

When it was clear that the smallpox vaccine was not able to prevent disease, the medical profession tried to justify vaccination by changing the goalposts from lifelong “perfect” immunity to “milder disease.” Similar dogma is repeated in 2013 to justify the fact that pertussis and influenza vaccines don’t protect recipients either. But did smallpox vaccination really decrease the death rate and make for a milder disease? In the 1844 smallpox epidemic, about one-third of the vaccinated contracted a mild form of smallpox, but roughly 8 percent of those vaccinated still died, and nearly two-thirds had severe disease.

A letter to a newspaper in 1850 claimed there were more admissions to the London SmallPox Hospital in 1844 than during the smallpox epidemic of 1781 before vaccination began. The author also noted that one-third of the deaths from smallpox were in people who had previously been vaccinated. Daily experience now unhappily shows an altered state of things: small pox, in spite of vaccination, is rapidly on the increase… There were more admissions to the London SmallPox Hospital in 1844 than in the celebrated smallpox epidemic of 1781 before vaccination was introduced. I shall also select the Registrar’s returns of one of the country districts (Bradford) to show how little protection vaccination afforded in the last quarter of that year, 1844: 118 [181?] deaths from smallpox were recorded, 60, or nearly one-third, of which had been vaccinated.

These reports from chapter 4 sound oh so familiar. The only difference being, they are from roundabout 200 years ago. The deeper I delve into this book, the more obvious the scam becomes. What I didn't know was how useless Jenner's cowpox vax really was for smallpox. And the part about the milder disease sounds exactly like what we were told two years ago. >In 1829 William Cobbett, a farmer, journalist, and English pamphleteer, wrote about the failure of vaccination to protect people from smallpox. Cobbett considered vaccination to be an unproven and a fraudulent medical practice. His reference to 20,000 pounds no doubt refers to the monetary amount the British government had advanced to Edward Jenner in 1822 for further smallpox vaccine experimentation. In the midst of all this mad work, to which the doctors, after having found it in vain to resist, had yielded, the real smallpox, in its worst form, broke out in the town of Ringwood, in Hampshire, and carried off, I believe, more than a hundred persons, young and old, every one of whom had had the cow-pox “so nicely!” And what was now said? Was the quackery exploded, and the granters of the twenty thousand pounds ashamed of what they had done? Not at all: the failure was imputed to unskillful operators; to the staleness of the matter; to its not being of genuine quality… what do we know now? Why, that in **hundreds of instances, persons cowpoxed by JENNER HIMSELF [William Cobbett’s capital emphasis], have taken the real smallpox afterwards, and have either died from the disorder, or narrowly escaped with their lives!** > # Vaccination makes for milder disease? > When it was clear that the smallpox vaccine was not able to prevent disease, the medical profession tried to justify vaccination by changing the goalposts from lifelong “perfect” immunity to “milder disease.” Similar dogma is repeated in 2013 to justify the fact that pertussis and influenza vaccines don’t protect recipients either. But did smallpox vaccination really decrease the death rate and make for a milder disease? In the 1844 smallpox epidemic, about one-third of the vaccinated contracted a mild form of smallpox, but roughly 8 percent of those vaccinated still died, and nearly two-thirds had severe disease. > A letter to a newspaper in 1850 claimed there were more admissions to the London SmallPox Hospital in 1844 than during the smallpox epidemic of 1781 before vaccination began. The author also noted that one-third of the deaths from smallpox were in people who had previously been vaccinated. Daily experience now unhappily shows an altered state of things: small pox, in spite of vaccination, is rapidly on the increase… **There were more admissions to the London SmallPox Hospital in 1844 than in the celebrated smallpox epidemic of 1781 before vaccination was introduced.** I shall also select the Registrar’s returns of one of the country districts (Bradford) to show how little protection vaccination afforded in the last quarter of that year, 1844: 118 [181?] deaths from smallpox were recorded, 60, or nearly one-third, of which had been vaccinated.