Thanks for playing the Smallpox & Polio card, Matt. It’s always a great teaching opportunity.
Yes, my parents permitted the state to vaccinate me in the late 1950s and early 1960s for both of those illnesses. They were as naïve about government as you still seem to be today. Admittedly, even I was naïve about the smallpox and polio vaccines until about five years ago, when I read Dr. Suzanne Humphries’ book” Dissolving Illusions”. However, if you’re suggesting that those vaccinations actually saved my life from smallpox or polio, you need to learn more history. Humphries’ book would be a great place to start.
Human beings suffered and died from many, many infectious diseases before the modern era. But the major change between then and now was not the development of vaccines: it was the leaps-and-bounds increases in economic prosperity, and the improved sanitation and hygiene (private and public) that came along with that.
If you look at the mortality graphs for polio, smallpox, measles, and several other diseases (I’ll attach these later) you’ll see that deaths from these diseases had already declined to almost zero BEFORE the vaccines were developed.
In the 19th century, most people lived under difficult, filthy, polluted conditions that we would find intolerable today. They worked much longer hours (including children) to scrape by, drank polluted water from streams and rivers into which they themselves emptied all their putrid wastes, often ate the meat from animals that had died of disease, and lived in clouds of soot and smoke from coal fires and wood fires. The city streets ran with human waste and horse waste. People didn’t know about vitamins or vitamin deficiencies. Disease was rampant, as it remains in those places in the third world where these conditions remain. People’s damaged bodies had no chance to heal, and no raw materials to do it with.
However, as society grew richer, many things changed. We got indoor plumbing. We got sewage treatment plants. The waterways were cleaned up. We got cars, so that the streets were no longer filled with manure. The air became less polluted due to liquid natural gas pipelines. We could afford decent meat instead of eating only diseased animals. In fact, we got meat inspectors who supposedly protected us from the worst of this (but it was really market competition that did it). Homes got refrigerators. We got central heating systems that kept us warm without smoking us into lung disease. Vitamin D was routinely added to products such as milk. Iodine was added to table salt. B vitamins and iron were added to some cereal products.
And illnesses declined accordingly. People’s resistance to infection increased, and their ability to heal from infections leapt too. The mortality rates dropped drastically. But most tellingly, the mortality rates declined in lockstep for diseases such as scarlet fever and typhoid fever—for which there was never a vaccine! So if you’re going to attribute the eradication of smallpox and polio to vaccines, what eradicated scarlet fever and typhoid fever?
Smallpox is the illness for which vaccines have been around longest. If you look at the graphs for smallpox and note the points during which they were mandatory (it varied, off and on, from place to place), you’ll find that the imposition of mandatory smallpox vaccination generally resulted in a huge INCREASE in smallpox deaths. That’s why the laws see-sawed back and forth between mandatory and voluntary, as populations became rebellious of having smallpox inflicted upon them.
Polio is an extremely interesting case. It has been around for centuries, but until about 1880, it was a mild illness that most people recovered from without becoming paralyzed and with no after-effects. In fact, Health Canada notes on its website that “Most polio infections (90-95%) are asymptomatic…less than [sic] 1% of cases result in paralysis.”
The word “poliomyelitis” before the 1950s was a catch-phrase for a wide variety of diseases that involved the inflammation of the grey portion of the spinal cord. “Polio” comes from the Greek word for “grey” and “myelitis” means “inflammation of the spinal column.” Nobody even discovered what is now officially designated to be the “polio virus” until the early 1950s. So, during the first half of the 20th century, many diagnoses of “polio” were made on diseases that we would today diagnose as coxsackievirus, septic meningitis, or EV-D68. It was only after the vaccine was developed that doctors around the world agreed upon new diagnostic requirements for “polio”, including the presence of a particular virus, and paralysis that exceeded 60 days.
In fact, this adoption of new diagnostic criteria immediately wiped out 80% of polio cases. Poof! They were gone! People were still sick, with the same symptoms, but now they were being labelled as sick with something else. Vaccines got the credit.
Despite its previous mildness, polio started to become paralytic around 1880. The book “The Moth in the Iron Lung” describes how an accidental release of the invasive gypsy moth, imported from Asia, soon became an environmental catastrophe in the Boston area. The moths had no natural North American predators, and they quickly denuded whole neighbourhoods of vegetation. Farmers found that lead arsenate, sprayed on crops, would prevent the gypsy moth caterpillars from devouring them. They began spraying heavily, and soon, paralysis epidemics broke out in the sprayed neighbourhoods.
Graphs showing the production of lead arsenate pesticides, plotted against paralytic polio, show a remarkable correlation. The lead arsenate didn’t “cause” polio, but it caused inflammation of children’s spinal cords, probably through leaky gut, and paralysis or death often resulted. It was labelled “polio” because that’s what all cases of spinal cord inflammation with paralysis were called in those days.
During WW2, another environmental toxin, DDT, was added to the lethal mix, resulting in the huge spikes in “polio” of the early 1950s. Everyone was told it was safe. There are videos and photos from that era showing clouds of DDT being sprayed on kids in swimming pools and people out picnicking in the park, often by trucks bearing signs, “DDT is good for me!”.
When you overlay the DDT production with the lead arsenate graph, the correlation to paralytic “polio” is unmistakeable. I’ll add the graph later.
As the use of lead, arsenic, DDT and other pesticides declined, so did incidents of paralytic “polio”. This was BEFORE the vaccines.
As with smallpox, the introduction of the polio vaccines by Salk and Sabin both brought sudden surges in polio cases. Then they “solved” that problem by redefining the diagnostic criteria, and the myth of the polio vaccine was solidified.
There were two types of polio vaccines developed: an oral vaccine with live polio virus in it, and a killed injectable vaccine. Here’s what Health Canada has to say about the oral vaccine (OPV):
“In persons who have received oral polio vaccine (OPV), poliovirus can be present in the throat for 1 to 2 weeks following immunization and can remain in feces for several weeks. In rare cases, including immunocompromised persons, poliovirus (from natural infection or OPV vaccine) can be excreted for prolonged periods of time (from greater than 6 months to a number of years)”
In other words, people who get the OPV can be shedding polio virus—the vaccine variety–for years, thereby infecting untold numbers of other people.
So now the world distinguishes between “wild” poliovirus and something else: i.e. the polio caused by OPV itself. Here’s Health Canada again:
“In 1994, Canada was certified as being free of WILD poliovirus by the World Health Organization. More recent cases of paralytic polio in Canada have been associated with importations of wild poliovirus AND THE USE OF OPV. The last nationally reported case of paralytic polio occurred in 1995 and WAS RELATED TO OPV RECEIPT. [Emphasis added.]”
To be clear, Canada stopped using the OPV in 1995 because it was causing polio in Canada and was considered too dangerous for our population. However, it is still being injected in people around the world. The US stopped using it domestically in 2000, according to the CDC:
“Polio can be prevented with vaccine. Inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) is the only polio vaccine that has been given in the United States since 2000. It is given by shot in the arm or leg, depending on the person’s age. Oral polio vaccine (OPV) is used in other countries.”
For the last several decades, foreigners have descended upon Third World countries and insisted on vaccinating their kids against polio, using the OPV that’s considered too dangerous for our own countries. Many of those Third World countries continue to use DDT and other pesticides that we have banned. Many have polluted air, polluted water, and no sanitation in their homes. That’s why they continue to get paralysis. It’s not a lack of vaccination. The do-gooders from the west would help them a lot more by putting in clean water systems, but there’s little profit in that. So they vax the hell out of them. And guess what?
In 2012, two doctors in India wrote: “while India has been polio-free for a year, there has been a huge increase in non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP). In 2011, there were an extra 47,500 new cases of NPAFP. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, THE INCIDENCE OF NPAFP WAS DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO DOSES OF ORAL POLIO RECEIVED. Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated. The principle of primum-non-nocere was violated.” [Emphasis added. That Latin means “first do no harm” and it has been part of the Hippocratic oath for millennia.]
That’s all for now. I’d be happy to take questions and post links for people to refer to.
