VACCINATION
An injection of common sense?
by Steven Ransom

Vaccination is heralded as the means of keeping us protected from the major diseases known to man. This particular medical intervention has also been credited with bringing an end to a number of supposedly 'killer epidemics'. Because of the largely supportive press that vaccination has received, the practice is rarely questioned, as vaccine critic Dr Richard Moskowitz states:

"Vaccines have become sacraments of our faith in biotechnology in the sense that (1) their efficacy and safety are widely seen as self-evident and needing no further proof; (2) they are given automatically to everyone, by force if necessary, but always in the name of the public good; (3) they ritually initiate our loyal participation in the medical enterprise as a whole. They celebrate our right and power as a civilization to manipulate biological processes ad-libitum and for profit, without undue concern for or even any explicit concept of the total health of the populations about to be subjected to them."

In the short essay Modern Medicine: The New World Religion, Oliver Clerc makes the point that our faith as such - the 'religious side' to humanity - isn't really dying away; our worship is merely being given over to another god:

"The facts show clearly - for anyone taking the time to study them - that medicine today enjoys an astonishing degree of undeserved credit that is out of all proportion to its actual results or promises. Real health keeps regressing, while the great medical 'miracles', such as vaccines and antibiotics, are now clearly showing their limitations, which some had foreseen and warned of right from the start. This undeserved credit comes mostly from the fact that medicine and science have replaced religion as the only certain belief in an uncertain world. And the doctors and scientists are seen as the priests of the new religion, delivering through the certainties of science what the old discredited gods were not able to deliver. If we can no longer believe in the miracles, cures and curses of the old religions, we can certainly believe in the miracles, the cures and the destructive powers of the new science."

'JUST KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON'
From smallpox to TB, from meningitis to the flu, the vaccines being injected to 'protect' us from these diseases are accepted by the great majority without question. With the advent of the Internet however, valid arguments against vaccination began to filter through. But so deep-rooted is our faith in vaccination, that we tend to shut our eyes and minds from objective examination of the subject, and 'just keep on keepin' on', believing that the experts know best. At what point do we finally draw the line and start to investigate for ourselves?

NOT SO GLOWING
A dispassionate examination of the true history of vaccination reveals a very different picture to the glowing falsehoods presented to us by the vaccine industry. The following statement from Gerhard Buchwald, a long-time critic of the vaccine industry, is quite illuminating:

"I have lectured all over the world and I have always had a special interest in newspapers. All of them have one thing in common, there is always some reference made to some epidemic in some part of the world. For instance, two years ago, one paper referred to a polio epidemic in Holland. For the past three years, our newspapers have commented on the diphtheria epidemic in Russia. By these means, the population is constantly threatened with epidemics, they have been made to fear them, and the reports always conclude: 'Go and get vaccinated.' "

THE FAMOUS EDWARD JENNER
At this stage, readers might well be saying, "What about Edward Jenner, the founder of vaccination? What about smallpox, TB, etc? Didn't these diseases decline with the introduction of Jenner's vaccination programme?" The popular accounts of the founder of vaccination and especially the story on smallpox eradication, to which all advocates of vaccination point as an example of 'success', differ greatly from what actually occurred.

Edward Jenner was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire on 17th May 1749. He was the eighth of the nine children born to the vicar of Berkeley, the Reverend Stephen Jenner, and his wife Sarah. By the time Edward was five years old, both of his parents had died and he was left in the care of his older sister, Mary, who was soon to marry the incoming vicar, the Reverend G. C. Black. Jenner went to school in Wotton-under-Edge and Cirencester.

JENNER: A VACCINE-INJURED CHILD?
It is sad to report that Jenner himself may well have been a vaccine-injured child. When he was eight years old, he was deemed to have come in contact with a smallpox-infected person and was subsequently variolated for smallpox. Variolation entailed the physician making a subcutaneous cut into the skin, into which human smallpox pustules were inserted. This barbaric treatment is reported to have had a lifelong effect upon Jenner's general health. In attempting to discover more on this particular matter, I am grateful to David Mullin, the curator of The Edward Jenner Museum in Berkeley, Gloucester. He quoted from a manuscript in his possession, entitled The Berkeley Papers, written by Thomas Dudley Fosbroke, who had known Edward Jenner personally. According to Fosbroke, six months after this treatment, Jenner still had not recovered. One does not need to ponder too hard the reasons why:

"He was a fine, ruddy boy, and at eight years of age, was, with many others, put under a preparatory process for Inoculation with the Smallpox, by the late Mr. Holbrow, of Wotton Underedge. This preparation lasted six weeks. He was bled to ascertain whether his blood was fine; was purged repeatedly, till he became emaciated and feeble; was kept on very low diet, small in quantity, and dosed with a diet-drink to sweeten the blood. After this barbarism of human-veterinary practice, he was removed to one of the then usual inoculation stables, and haltered up with others in a terrible state of disease, although none died. The effect of the preparation and inoculation just mentioned was this - as a child, he could never enjoy sleep and was constantly haunted by imaginary noises; and a sensibility too acutely alive to these and sudden jars has ever since subsisted."

One can hardly begin to imagine what a catastrophic effect, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, this treatment would have had on the young Jenner. And the wounds seemed to have lasted a lifetime. Jenner was 71 at the time of Fosbroke's writings.

At the age of 14, Jenner was apprenticed for seven years to Mr Daniel Ludlow, a surgeon of Chipping Sodbury, where he gained most of the experience needed for his future occupation as a surgeon.

THE CUCKOO PAPERS
In 1770, Jenner moved to St. George's Hospital in London to complete his medical training under the surgeon, John Hunter. At 23, he returned to his native village of Berkeley, staying there for 17 years, to practice as an unqualified surgeon and apothecary, as yet unknown to the world at large. In real terms, there was little difference between a qualified or unqualified surgeon. The ministrations from either were nothing less than barbaric. The particular surgical 'skills' that Jenner brought to his home town high street consisted of bloodletting, either by cutting veins or by applying leeches, and rapid amputation - without anaesthetics - of limbs that were gangrenous with infection after injury. The operation that Jenner performed most frequently was 'cutting for the stone' - the removal of kidney stones. There was no pain relief or anaesthesia in those days, and the death rate was extremely high for almost all major surgical operations. This was primarily due to the scant attention paid to cleanliness and general hygiene in the operating 'theatre'.

In 1787, Jenner sent a paper on 'The Natural History of the Cuckoo' to the Royal Society and, with Hunter's influence, was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society (F.R.S.). Three years later he applied to St. Andrew's University for an M.D. and became Dr. Jenner for the modest outlay of £15. Later on in life, after several applications, he was also granted an M.D. by the University of Oxford, though this was not until after his vaccination theory had been generally adopted. Addressing an anti-vaccination crowd during the late 19th century, this whole period was summarised by a Dr Walter Hadwen thus:

"Now this man Jenner had never passed a medical examination in his life. Jenner looked upon the whole thing as a superfluity, and he hung up 'Surgeon, Apothecary' over his door without any of the qualifications that warranted the assumption. It was not until twenty years after he was in practice that he thought it advisable to get a few letters after his name. Consequently he then communicated with a Scotch University and obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine for the sum of £15 and nothing more.

Then he sent to the Royal College of Physicians in London to get their diploma, and even presented his Oxford degree as an argument in his favour. But they considered he had had quite enough on the cheap already, and told him distinctly that until he passed the usual examinations they were not going to give him any more. This was a sufficient check in Jenner's case, and he settled down quietly without any diploma of physician."

The apparent ease with which Jenner gained his medical qualifications was also noted by vaccine historian A. W. Hutton:

"His professional acquirements were but slender; his medical degree was the outcome of no examination or scientific work, but merely of a fee of fifteen guineas paid to the University of St. Andrews; while his other and more important distinction, his Fellowship in the Royal Society, was obtained by what even Dr. Norman Moore, his latest biographer and apologist, is constrained to admit was little else than a fraud."

MIND YOUR OWN BEESWAX
Jenner was particularly interested in looking at ways of treating smallpox. This was considered a very serious condition, not least because of the pock marks left on the skin of the survivors, especially on the face. In higher circles, ladies (and sometimes gentlemen) took to bees-waxing their faces to improve their 'pocked' appearance. Today, if you visit houses of the early 19th century, you are likely to see adjustable fire screens to each side of the fireplace. This shield-shaped furniture was commonplace. Since the only source of heat was by the fireplace, ladies were known to inadvertently melt their facial beeswax. The screens were put there to avoid this embarrassment. Since no real lady would call attention to another lady to attend to that which she was not supposed to be wearing in the first place, the admonition to "Mind your own beeswax!" came into general use.

In 1796, with smallpox ravaging towns and cities in the UK, Jenner was seeking ways of treating this condition. Based on an age-old folklore remedy at the time, he formulated a particular mixture from cowpox sores and, via two cuts made into the arm, introduced this mixture into an 8 year-old boy named James Phipps. Phipps never contracted smallpox. Was this the breakthrough the world was waiting for? Was this remedy more than just folklore? It seemed that Jenner was on to something. In fact, Jenner's 'pox' remedy was based loosely on the age-old medical theory of 'like cures like' - a pox cures pox. Not surprisingly, variations of the 'like cures like' theme had been in existence for many centuries.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF 'LIKE CURES LIKE'
Earliest medical records contain numerous accounts of tribes using animals and birds of various colours in healing rituals. Diseased individuals with, let us say, jaundice or yellow fever would have incantations said over them. The disease would be commanded to leave, and at the same time a yellow bird would be released, flying away with the similarly coloured symptoms and hopefully the disease. Many books make reference to Hippocrates, famed for stating: "Where there is illness there also is the cure." While this statement might appear profound, it actually contains very little information that could be considered meaningful.

In the 15th century, the alchemist and physician Paracelsus popularised another derivative of 'like cures like' - 'the doctrine of signatures'. This is the belief that plants, flowers and leaves of a certain shape are medicinally beneficial for human organs of a similar shape, hence the names of plants such as heartsease, eyebright, lungwort, spleenwort, liverwort, etc. Again, references to this idea are found in earliest recorded medical history, but it was Paracelsus who gathered all the strands together to present what he claimed to be his doctrine.

As early as the 10th century, Chinese medical texts refer to variolation for the treatment of smallpox, whereby powdered scabs from smallpox pustules were inserted into the nose or under the skin, via cuts to the body, a tradition that was to last for many centuries and formed the basis for the young Jenner's treatment. In 1755, a certain Mr. Porter, English Ambassador to Constantinople, wrote the following:

"It is the tradition and opinion of the country that a certain angel presides over this disease [smallpox]. That it is to bespeak his favour and evidence their confidence that the Georgians take a small portion of variolous matter, and, by means of scarification [cutting], introduce it between the thumb and fore finger of a sound person. The operation is supposed to never miss its effect. To secure beyond all uncertainty, the good will of the angel, they hang up scarlet clothes about the bed, that being the favourite colour of the celestial inhabitant they wish to propitiate."
A Dr Henry Lindlahr offers a more contemporary assessment:

"Jenner, an English barber and chiropodist, is usually credited with the discovery of vaccination. The doubtful honour, however, belongs in reality to an old Circassian woman who, according to the historian Le Duc, in the year 1672 startled Constantinople with the announcement that the Virgin Mary had revealed to her an unfailing preventive against the smallpox. Her specific was inoculation with the genuine smallpox virus. The Circassian seeress cut a cross in the flesh of people and inoculated this wound with the smallpox virus. Together with this she prescribed prayer, abstinence from meat, and fasting for forty days. But even with her [or the Virgin Mary] the idea was not an original one, because the principle of isopathy (curing a disease with its own disease products) was explicitly taught one hundred years before that by Paracelsus, the great genius of the Renaissance of learning of the Middle Ages. But even he was only voicing the secret teachings of ancient folklore, sympathy healing and magic dating back to the Druids and Seers of ancient Britain and Germany."

PUS, BLOOD AND HAIR
Minus the scarlet threads, Jenner was simply building on medical theories that had been in existence for centuries previously. The poor unfortunates injected with Jenner's 'mixture' received a combination of bovine pus extracted from lacerated calves' bellies, plus bovine skin, flesh, blood and hair. To create this concoction, calves were strapped down to a table, their bellies were lacerated and then rubbed with various toxins, including pustules from smallpox victims. This caused the cuts to become infected and fester, the resultant pus forming the basis for Jenner's smallpox vaccine. Jenner's own particularly poisonous concoctions introduced nothing new to the barbaric and largely ineffective 18th century conventional medical cabinet.

What then of Phipps and others who had been vaccinated by Jenner in those experimental years? After all, Phipps lived, but not for very long, dying of TB at aged 20. During this time, Jenner had also been inoculating his son with swine-pox matter, from aged 18 months, and he continued to do so intermittently over the years. He too died of TB, aged twenty one. Several vaccination historians have argued that the toxic assault caused by the smallpox vaccine weakened the immune system to such an extent that TB was more easily contracted by the vaccine recipients. Dr A Wilder, Professor of Pathology and the former editor of The New York Medical Times, stated:

"Consumption (TB) follows in the wake of vaccination as surely as effect follows cause."

And a Dr. William Howard Hay, addressing the Medical Freedom Society, reminds us of the inevitable ill-health that must surely follow Jenner's 'ministrations':

"It is nonsense to think that you can inject pus - and it is usually from the pustule end of the dead smallpox victim - it is unthinkable that you can inject that into a little child and in any way improve its health. The body has its own methods of defence. These depend on the vitality of the body at the time. If it is vital enough, it will resist all infections; if it isn't vital enough, it won't. And you can't change the vitality of the body for the better by introducing poison of any kind into it."

These unsavoury facts are of course omitted from today's glowing conventional vaccination fables.

THE LIFE-PRESERVING FLUID!
In 1798, after several unsuccessful attempts to find the right formula, Jenner mixed a combination of horse-grease and cowpox matter, 'horse grease' being the general term used for the by-product derived from seborrhoeal lesions - a scaling disorder of the skin, found on the lower limbs of the horse, due to unclean stable conditions. This new variation superseded his original concoction, which he admitted had "…no protective virtue." Dr Walter Hadwen, from whom we have already heard, was a notorious vaccine critic at the end of the 19th century. In Goddard's Assembly Rooms, Gloucester, on January 25th 1896, during the height of the Gloucester smallpox crisis, Hadwen gave a remarkable speech to the people on the failures of Jenner and the ideas he proposed. On the matter of horse grease, Hadwen notes:

"I had better, at the outset, state to you distinctly the position I occupy on the subject. I stand here not only as a medical man, but as a father and a citizen. As a medical man I look upon vaccination as an insult to common sense, as superstitious in its origin, unscientific in theory and practice, and useless and dangerous in its character; while as a father and a citizen I view the Compulsory Vaccination Acts as demoralising in their tendencies, degrading in their character, cruel and unjust in their enactments, and an unwarrantable interference with parental responsibility and liberty - (cheers) - such as ought not to be tolerated in a country like England, which has boasted of her civil and religious freedom for generations past. (Renewed cheers.)

It seems that a man had been seeing to the grease upon a horse's heels, and had gone to milk the cows without washing his hands. The result was that it produced that peculiar kind of disease known by the name of horse-grease cowpox. "This," said Jenner, "is the life-preserving fluid!" and he went home to write about the wonderful virtues of horse-grease cowpox. However, it was necessary to perform an experiment, and he inoculated a boy named John Baker with horse-grease, direct from the horse's heels. He intended later to inoculate him with smallpox in order to see whether it would take, but the poor boy died in the workhouse directly afterwards from a contagious fever contracted from the inoculation."

And extracts from a kindly biography even, written by Jenner's good friend Dr John Baron, sensitively attest to the uselessness of Jenner's cowpox mixtures:

"Many years elapsed before he had an opportunity of completing his projected experiments in vaccination, and he encountered numerous difficulties in carrying on the preliminary part of his inquiry. In the first place, he had found from his own observation, as well as from that of other medical gentlemen in the county, that what was commonly called cow pox, was not a certain preventive of smallpox. This fact damped, but did not extinguish, his ardour." (Emphasis mine)

And further in the same biography:

"He learned that there were well-authenticated instances to prove that when the true cowpox broke out among the cattle at a dairy, and was communicated to the milkers, even they had subsequently had smallpox. Tidings of this kind, which seemed to render further investigation useless, checked for a season his fond hopes; but resistance and difficulty only augmented his energy, and he resumed his labours with redoubled zeal."

Despite the fact that his founding theory had floundered twice-over, Jenner pressed on regardless. In 1802, Jenner's misguided zeal was given a considerable boost when the UK government gave him £10,000 (equivalent to roughly £250,000 today) to explore his ideas further - a sobering reminder that there's no accounting for some government grants. With smallpox still considered the most pressing disease at that time, Jenner accepted the generous state gift. He took some of his horse-grease cowpox mixture and inoculated six children and, without waiting to see the result, took his experimental paper to London to get it heard and hopefully printed. Dr Hadwen again:

"And in that paper he had the audacity to assert that it was not necessary to wait to see the result because the proofs he already had were so conclusive, and time experiments had told such an extraordinary tale - although he had completed but one experiment in his life, and that did not prove it at all. As soon as the paper was published the outcry was tremendous. "What?" said the people, "Take horse-grease? Filthy grease from horses' heels, take that and put it into the blood of a child?" No, they would have nothing to do with it. They did not mind having cowpox without the horse, but they could not think of having the cowpox with the horse in it. Dr. Pearson wrote to Jenner, telling him he must take the horse out or "it would damn the whole thing." Consequently - there is no accounting for taste - they denounced horse-grease cowpox, but were prepared to accept spontaneous cowpox."

LARGE REVENUES
In 1807, Jenner convinced the Royal College of Physicians and the British Parliament that his original vaccine was safe and effective, having dutifully reverted to his original cow-pus mixture. Moreover, he stressed that the latter could also produce large revenues. In a manner not too dissimilar to the way in which today's UK Medicines Control Agency is in the lap of the pharmaceutical industry, the mention of those two words large revenues sealed the matter. Despite there being no evidence that Jenner's vaccination worked, vaccination began in earnest.

Throughout his smallpox years, Jenner was convinced that he had been 'called' as some kind of saviour for mankind and that God had tasked him to find the cure for smallpox:

"The joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities was so excessive that I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie."

JENNER THE FREEMASON
Jenner's reverie was soon to be interrupted with yet another government grant, this time for £500,000 in today's terms. Jenner's belief that he had been divinely called to solve the smallpox crisis may well have been reinforced in his mind and spirit through his heavy involvement in freemasonry. He held the position of Worshipful Master of his local freemason's lodge - The Royal Faith and Friendship Lodge No. 270, Berkeley, where he led many esoteric meetings with assorted titled gentry. Anyone who has studied freemasonry from a spiritual perspective however, will note that there is a clear demarcation between the 'divinity' of freemasons and their craft and the divinity of God, as described in Scripture, which expressly forbids such occultist involvement.

Supporters of freemasonry described lodge meetings as a means of conveying to the individual the upright principles of brotherly love, equality, truth and of the 'divinity' within. Opposition to freemasonry stemmed from the fact that masonic rituals and teachings demonstrated occult influence and that meetings were always conducted behind closed doors, inviting the very reasonable question - why should knowledge considered beneficial to mankind be kept from the great majority of mankind?

Titles, prestige, position and money in abundance, but still, Jenner could not present one iota of evidence for the efficacy of vaccination. His belief that he had been divinely called, coupled with grant monies now totalling £750,000, allowed him to provide his vaccination 'service' free of charge to the poor, a service he dispensed from a thatched hut he called his Temple of Vaccinia. Goodness knows how much ill-health and death Jenner dispensed during those years. Sadly, as is so often the case with prestigious individuals 'wanting only to help humanity', the finer details of their methodologies are generally accepted a priori. Who are we to nit-pick and question such honourable and philanthropic intentions?

By the time of his death in 1823, Jenner had witnessed none of the miraculous reversals of smallpox, such as those falsely reported in today's conventional medical texts. The people continued to die at a very high rate, and not only from smallpox. Even among the vaccinated, there was consumption, typhoid, cholera and a number of other seemingly indiscriminate killers. Why was this?

This article is an excerpt from 'Wake Up to Health in the 21st Century' by Steve Ransom. Pick up a copy of this excellent book for the full story on vaccination and many other subjects complete with references. For any comments or questions please contact the author here.

Further Resources
Need to know about the vaccine controversy?
Wake up to Health in the 21st Century by Steven Ransom
Health Wars by Phillip Day

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