Before proceeding to sum up the broad statistical case against vaccination, it may be well here to point out some of the misconceptions, erroneous statements, vague opinions, and conclusions which are opposed to the evidence, which abound in this feeble Report.
And first, we have the repetition of an oft-corrected and obviously erroneous statement as to the absolute identity of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, except on the one point of vaccination. The Commissioners say: “Those, therefore, who are selected as being vaccinated persons might just as well be so many persons chosen at random out of the total number attacked. So far as any connection with the incidence of, or the mortality from, small-pox is concerned, the choice of persons might as well have been made according to the colour of the clothes they wore” (_Final Report_, par. 213). But there are tables in the Reports showing that about one-seventh of all small-pox deaths occur in the first six months of life, and by far the larger part of this mortality occurs in the first three months. The age of vaccination varies actually from three to twelve months, and many children have their vaccination specially delayed on account of ill-health, so that the “unvaccinated” always include a large proportion of those who, _merely because they are infants_, supply a much larger proportion of deaths from small-pox than at any other age. Yet the Commissioners say the unvaccinated might as well be chosen at random, or by the colour of their clothes so far as any liability to small-pox is concerned. One stands amazed at the hardihood of a responsible body of presumably sensible and truth-seeking men who can deliberately record as a fact what is so obviously untrue.
Hardly less important is it that the bulk of the unvaccinated, those who escape the vaccination officers, are the very poor, and the nomad population of the country—tramps, beggars and criminals, the occupants of the tenement houses and slums of our great cities, who, being all weekly tenants, are continually changing their residence. Such were referred to, in the Report of the Local Government Board for 1882 (p. 309), as constituting the bulk of the thirty-five thousand of default, under the heading—“Removed, not to be traced, or otherwise accounted for.”