We live in a world where anyone who is bold enough to question vaccines and demand the science to prove their effectiveness and safety is immediately met with derision. Instead of being provided the science, they are slapped with the label “anti vaxxers”.

How scientific!

That is no different to anyone challenging any other dogma being labelled a heretic instead of being given proof to substantiate the dogma.

And what is wrong with questioning and demanding the science?

Was it not such questioning which brought an end to blind faith in dogma and the birth of modern science? How can science grow without healthy skepticism?

And was it not Bertrand Russell who had stated that:

“ The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt”?

So if the medics are so cocksure about vaccines, should they not be persuading people with truckloads of science?

Meanwhile, amidst all the puerile and insidious name calling, the “science”, according to the anti vaxxers’ claims, remains nebulous at best, and downright non existent at worst.

After years of labeling people “anti vaxxers”, a term for those blindly pushing vaccines without coming up with hard science has also surfaced and been coined. They are the “vax pushers”.

In this world of psychological warfare through name calling and pigeon holing, we now have a level playing field, and can get on with looking for the science.

Have the vax pushers ever shown hard science to counter the anti vaxxers’ claim that the vax pushers are just pushing superstitions, that just so happen to be rolling out billions of euros in profit?

When there is so much money being made one needs to be cautious right?

Our search down the rabbit hole will also take us in a future episode to the world of money, commerce and intrigue surrounding the vaccine industry.

In this first episode we cover the humble beginnings of the holy grail of the vaccine industry. You guessed it, the birth of vaccinology and the rise of the smallpox vaccine.

Many people are aware of the fact that vax pushers have been pushing the smallpox argument for years. Their argument goes that smallpox, a horrific disease not so different from a form of plague, was wiped out all thanks to vaccination. The anti vaxxers on the other hand dispute those claims and say that they are bogus.

So we decided to look into the smallpox vaccine claims, the holy grail of vaccinology, in order to see if they hold water on scientific and historical grounds.

Vaccinology has its roots in the Anglo Saxon world, so a good first place to look is England in the 1800’s.

Our Journey begins with two well-known personalities. In this episode we take a look at the first one, Edward Jenner, the so called father of vaccines.

The other personality is Sir Edwin Chadwick, a distinguished lawyer who brought extensive social reform that revolutionised public health in England. But more of him in episode two.

Edward Jenner has been described by the Global Freedom Movement as a charlatan, who advertised himself as a doctor and surgeon for years before buying himself a medical degree for £15 from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Labelling the father of vaccines a charlatan seems somewhat harsh, one might think:

“oh, this is just some malicious anti vaxxer bashing the father of vaccines”, the vax pushers would no doubt cry out.

So we decided to investigate and carry out our own research by going down the rabbit hole that takes us back over 200 years. Then we can all draw our own conclusions. There is nothing like a good old dose of historical research to get us started on this hot subject.

We searched hard for any record of Jenner’s medical degrees. Or for any other degrees, for that matter. But all we came up with was that at the age of 14, around 1763, he worked as an apprentice for a village surgeon for 7 years in a little country village of a few hundred people, called Chipping Sodbury.

It was during such training that the enthusiastic teenager apprentice came across a young milkmaid who claimed that she felt immune to smallpox because she had contracted cowpox.

Having picked up this anecdote, and hopefully nothing else, from his acquaintance the milkmaid, the young apprentice thought he was on to a good thing and decided to run with it.

Jenner then went on to London around 1790, aged 21, to work at St George’s hospital under the surgeon John Hunter, where he carried on learning, presumably as another apprentice, for around two years.

He then returned to his home town in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, where he “practiced” medicine for the rest of his life.

For the record it is worth noting that in the 18th century there was no law in England requiring medical practitioners to be certified.

In other words, anyone could practice medicine and get away with it, without fearing the arm of the law. And so according to the global freedom article, quoting Dr Walter Hadwin in 1896, Jenner stuck up a sign outside his clinic calling himself “surgeon and apothecary”, and started his practice, with no one the wiser of his true qualifications.

We have in fact found no records showing that Jenner ever passed any medical exams or earned himself a medical degree through study and attending a University.

And yet the medical community, which is so quick to shoot down any “quacks” who are not part of their confraternity, or even any of their own who dare to deviate from the mainstream, hail him as their founder and discoverer of the holy grail of vaccines.

Interesting set of weights and measures!

Going deeper down the rabbit hole, we find out that Jenner took it upon himself in 1796 to inject a boy named James Phipps with puss taken from a cowpox postule.

The boy did not contract smallpox. This was enough for the intrepid Jenner, emboldened by his apprenticeships, to try to argue that Phipps, who did not subsequently contract smallpox had therefore become immune. He had suddenly become immune to smallpox because he had been injected with cowpox pus.

Lo and behold! That is how vaccine immunology was born. From superstition and old wives’ tales rather than proper science.

Jenner continued to run with it in search of huge grants and prizes from Parliament that would make him rich. So following the money actually starts with Jenner himself.

Of course, such blatant lack of logic, scientific procedures and a sufficient number of cases (he had only 1 case, of a boy who allegedly had contracted and healed from cowpox) to show statistical significance that he had proven his theory, is not only absurd and ludicrous, but would be thrown out by the rules of medical science and exposed him for the charlatan that he was.  

In fact, when Jenner submitted a paper to the Royal Society the following year describing his experiment, it was thrown out and dismissed offhand.

It was around this time that Jenner, inspired by his teenage acquaintance the milkmaid, coined the term “vaccine”, which is derived from the word cow (vacca).

Another detail worth mentioning is that doctors in England knew of many cases where persons who had contracted cowpox went on to contract smallpox.

So, Jenner’s theory, picked up from an anecdote or old wives’ tale of his milkmaid friend, should have been dead in the water right from the start, since the science was already there to disprove it.

But we must also put things into perspective and remember that this was the time of “leech mania”, when established medicine was obsessed with using leeches and blood letting as general panaceas.

So it is not surprising that Jenner’s dogged perseverance of his milkmaid theory somehow started gaining momentum.

One could argue that anything was better than leech mania, right?

That’s it for Episode One on the search for the scientific basis of vaccines.

Look out for the next episode, as the plot thickens, when we introduce you to Sir Edwin Chadwick, a distinguished jurist and reformer who has been conveniently forgotten or overlooked in the whole saga relating to public health.

 

Ref:

https://globalfreedommovement.org/5-historical-vaccine-scandals-suppressed

https://www.famousscientists.org/edward-anthony-jenner/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/jenner_edward.shtml