In a book published in 1883, P.A. Siljestrom — once a member of the Swedish Parliament — comments on other diseases replacing smallpox when smallpox disappeared. While we can always dig deeper and discuss terrain versus germ theory as it relates to his comments, for our purposes here the comments serve as an effective reductio ad absurdum to the pro-vaccine narrative: attempting to eradicate disease (whether located from without or within a person) in an unnatural way does not make disease disappear, but exacerbates it.
In short, the unnatural “elimination” of one disease simply begets or creates a vacuum for other diseases. Indeed, using vaccination — a source of untold illnesses — to prevent disease is like a drunken man attempting to drink himself into sobriety with more alcohol.
Looking to today, we have about the sickest generation of children ever — with the greatest reason being the ever-growing vaccine schedule.
From P.A. Siljestrom, “A momentous Education Question for the Consideration of Parents and Others who desire the Well-being of the Rising Generation” (1883):
What happens is, that other diseases take the place of the small-pox when this disappears: a circumstance worthy of our profound attention. Thus the eminent English Physiologist, Dr. W. B. Carpenter, who for the last year or two has stood forward as the champion of Vaccination with conspicuous zeal … is compelled to admit that at the same time that the mortality of small-pox — through the influence of Vaccination, as he thinks — has declined, the mortality of measles and scarlet fever especially has increased.
The latest balance of the account then is, that 90 odd per cent. of the population, who absolutely want no protection, must submit to have their sound health more or less sacrificed to Vaccination, in order that the small remaining percentage may be able to die of some other disease rather than small-pox; for example, of measles, or scarlatina. We will not deny that one kind of death may seem to be less disagreeable than another; but at the best here lies the entire gain. Of the patients who recover from disease, it is true that those who have passed through small-pox may exhibit ugly consequences of scarred faces; although in the most of cases by due medical care, this disaster may, it is alleged, be prevented. They may, indeed, suffer from other troubles worse than pock-marks. On the other hand, a too sad experience has taught us in the last few years, that scarlet fever for example does not pass away without most grievous consequences: to say nothing of the fact that the mortality in this disease at any rate is fully as great as in small-pox; if not greater in proportion to the number of those attacked.
But if the account stands so, it will hardly be denied, that the possible gain is far too insignificant, whether we regard its peculiar character, or the relative number of those who will enjoy it, in comparison with the probable loss which has to be carried to the other side of the reckoning. In the meantime, what happens in the most of human affairs happens here — that in practice neither the gain nor the loss is what theory has expected. The benignity of nature seems in fact gradually to build up again what Vaccination pulls down: and the consequence is that on the one hand the protection against small-pox is not what its advocates alleged that it should be; and on the other hand the injury to the human family not what under other circumstances we should have reason to fear. But when the Vaccinationists, to make the protection permanent, insist upon re-vaccination, that is to say, insist upon keeping the organism continually in the diseased state we have already spoken of, then indeed without a doubt we enter upon a path of extreme danger. And this procedure is the more motiveless because the restorative process of nature to which we have alluded, if such a process exists, must be very various in different individuals, which makes it impossible to decide upon the right time for re-vaccination. Recruits for the army are compelled to undergo re-vaccination: it has been proposed to enforce it on young persons of both sexes before the administration of the Lord’s Supper. It is hard to see any reason for either of these compulsions, even from the point of view of the pro-vaccinators. …
It is proved beyond all question that by the process of Vaccination, different sorts of disease and dispositions to disease, even if latent in the child from which the vaccine is taken, may be carried over to the child which is vaccinated. To begin with, hereditary venereal disease — syphilis — may be singled out as perhaps the most dangerous of these infections, and as the one the communication of which is the best established by actual facts.
P.A. Siljestrom, A momentous Education Question for the Consideration of Parents and Others who desire the Well-being of the Rising Generation, trans. J.J. Garth Wilkinson (Westminster: William Young, 1883), 17-21.
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