The Leicester
Anti-Vaccination League
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Vaccine
critics
The Leicester Anti-Vaccination League was formed in
1869. The stalwart little band of pioneers, numbering less than twenty persons,
laboured on, until they grew numerically to such an extent that, whereas in 1867
over 94 per cent. of the children born were vaccinated, in 1897 only 1.3 per
cent, of the infants were subjected to the trying ordeal. And that low
percentage of vaccinations in the last-mentioned year was arrived at in spite
of—and perhaps, to some extent, as the natural outcome of—many thousands of
prosecutions against defaulters. These were instituted under the oppressive Act
of 1867, and resulted in the infliction of fines, the levying of distress
warrants, and the commitment of parents to prison. Obviously, those figures
demonstrate that the people of Leicester were following the lead of the
Anti-Vaccination League, and that not one class only, but all sections of the
townspeople, were equally resolute in their opposition and detestation of the
hateful legal enactments.
The experience of the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1871-73,
when many thousands of vaccinated persons contracted the disease, and several
hundreds died as the result of the alleged "protection" (!) having lamentably
failed in its hour of trial, produced in the minds of the thinking people of
Leicester pronounced hostility against the blood-polluting quackery, which was
found to be more baneful in its ultimate results than the disease it was
supposed to prevent.
LEICESTER: SANITATION versus VACCINATION
BY J.T. BIGGS J.P.