Smallpox Vaccine Death

A Long, Ignored History

Vaccine deaths have always existed, and have always been denied. This is a story of some of these forgotten vaccine deaths.

Inoculation Deaths

Inoculation, or variolation, was the practice of deliberately infecting someone with smallpox. This was the practice that was used prior to the introduction of the Jennerian method of deliberately infecting people with cowpox as a method to protect from smallpox.

This practice was very dangerous. The more sensible (if that’s the right word) inoculators admitted this risk, they just argued that the odds were better with inoculation than natural infection since they had observed that people generally only got smallpox once.

A man called Jurin (a pro-inoculator) collected statistical data on the question of inoculation. He stated that inoculation had a death rate of 1 in 48 (13 in 624). But that the natural disease killed 1 in 6, so that the odds were better with inoculation (of course, what this logic ignores is that you aren’t guaranteed to get smallpox, and even if you were, you might get it many years later, meaning many life years lost to inoculation).

The Case of John Baker

When Edward Jenner entered into this discussion, he performed experiments on children to attempt to prove that cowpox protected from smallpox. This bit is well known, what is less emphasised, however, is Jenner’s arguments relating to horse grease and cowpox. Jenner believed that there was more than one form of disease of the cow’s teat – horse grease cowpox and spontaneous cowpox. In his initial text, the Inquiry, he argued that the protective form of cowpox was the horse grease form. Jenner believed that the disease was essentially artificial in the cow. The chain of events was as follows, in Jenner’s mind: the horse developed a disease known as grease which affected the heels of the horse. The farrier would have to dress the heels of the horse, causing the disease to be on his hands. However, he also did double duty milking the cow, and as such, then spread the disease to the cow’s teat. Pustules and inflammation developed on the teat as a result and this was horse grease cowpox (which could protect from smallpox).

This is relevant because Jenner wanted to compare direct horse grease with horse grease cowpox. As such, he vaccinated two children, one with horse grease direct and one with cowpox. The child vaccinated with the horse grease was John Baker, a 5-year-old. Jenner had intended to test his immunity by inoculating him for smallpox, but he was ‘rendered unfit for inoculation’, Jenner said, by a fever he caught in the workhouse. The boy died and the most plausible assumption is that he died as a result of the vaccination experiment.

‘Preserving Vaccination From Reproach’

Vaccination death has always been covered up by the medical establishment. As critics of vaccination have pointed out, one way this is done is to put the symptom on the death certificate, but not the cause of the symptom. In this way it can be stated that the child died of erysipelas or some other condition, without blaming vaccination.

What is of interest is we have one case from the 19th century where a doctor openly stated they concealed vaccination as the cause of death on a death certificate. Henry May, a physician from Birmingham (United Kingdom) stated the following in 1874:

A death from Vaccination occurred not long ago in my practice, and although I had not vaccinated the child, yet in my desire to preserve Vaccination from reproach, I omitted all mention of it from my certificate of death.

HENRY MAY, CITED IN WHITE 1885

20th Century Deaths

For much of the twentieth century, deaths from vaccination were higher than deaths from smallpox. Smallpox declined due to increased sanitation:

A Mr. John Cryer, an ardent anti-vaccinationist, taught school in Bradford, Eng. One day he noticed a lad of about twelve years—a new pupil in school. He questioned him: “Where did you come from?” “Sheffield, sir.” “How long have you resided there?” “Six years, sir.” “How many are there in the family ?” “Six of us, sir.” “Then you were in Sheffield during the small-pox epidemic ?” “Yes, sir.” “Did any of you have the small-pox?” “Oh, no, sir, we lived in a front street.” That last sentence tells the whole story. It is worth more than a dozen reports of Local Guardians; worth more than whole columns of statistics. It hits the nail square on the head, and locates the disease. Why didn’t the lad say: “Oh, no, sir, we were all vaccinated?”

J.M. PEEBLES

Vaccination also declined significantly after the mandates were eased and objection clauses inserted.

Nevertheless we have multiple deaths reported from vaccination. Between 1933-1946 there were 89 child deaths from vaccination according to the official statistics. During the same time 28 died from smallpox. This will likely be a large undercount due to the concealment of vaccination deaths.

This is a very small sample of death that has occurred as a result of smallpox inoculation and vaccination.

Image via openverse.