George Bernard Shaw on vaccination

[happyexpat]

[East Sun]

Posted by happyexpat (here)

Oh, so he did say something useful, after all.

[161803398]

He said a lot about vaccination:

On August 9, 1944, the Irish Times published a letter from Mr. Shaw in which he "added a few words" to a very appreciative account of him that had appeared in that paper. Dealing with some of his alleged eccentricities, Mr. Shaw protested that there is nothing eccentric in his objection to the dangerous and grossly unscientific operation called vaccination. He wrote:

"Within my long lifetime, its ruthless enforcement throughout Europe ended in two of the worst epidemics of smallpox in record, our former more dreaded typhus and cholera epidemics having meanwhile been ended by sanitation. After that failure, the credit of vaccination was saved for a while by the introduction of isolation, which at once produced improved figures. At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by. vaccination than by smallpox.
Yet the British Government, against the law, has just made vaccination compulsory in the Army by explicitly refusing to discipline an officer who has had an objector forcibly vaccinated; and the House of Commons received the news with cheers. Why does this exploded superstition persist? Simply because our education is not controversial, which means that as it is a hundred years out of date on all open questions, reforms have to come from the uneducated who suffer from the facts and know nothing of the books. .
My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths."---George Bernard Shaw (August 9, 1944, the Irish Times)

[Corncrake]

And this was written before the infamous contaminated Salk Polio vaccine of 1952 ...

[Akasha]

A bunch of legendary quotes from the man here and here: very true, poignant and highly entertaining!

[happyexpat]

There is nothing new under the sun... Amazing they do the same thing with statistics now that was done so long ago...

"During the last considerable epidemic at the turn of the century, I was a member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, and I learned how the credit of vaccination is kept up statistically by diagnosing all the revaccinated cases (of smallpox) as pustular eczema, varioloid or what not---except smallpox."---George Bernard Shaw

This is also a great page of his quotes on vaccinations. I had no idea he was so prolific about it.

George Bernard Shaw Vaccine Quotes and More

[happyexpat]

Posted by Corncrake (here)
And this was written before the infamous contaminated Salk Polio vaccine of 1952 ...

I do believe based on the research I did before deciding not to vaccinate, small pox was really where it all started and the leviathan has marched on from there. It is all about the profits and nothing to do with human health.

We are treated like we are so revolutionary for not wanting to vaccinate, but he was writing letters to the National Anti-Vaccination League in 1906 and the Irish Anti-Vaccination League in 1911. Here we are 100 years later being treated like trying to protect our children from injected toxins is something new.