Rumors keep turning up to the effect that the recent mass smallpox vaccination killed more people than the disease itself did, but we have it on the word of Dr. Weinstein, the city Health Commissioner, that this is poppycock. As far as his department knows, not a single one of the six million three hundred and fifty-odd thousand people vaccinated here between March 28th and May 5th has even become dangerously ill as a result of the inoculation. “About two hundred people die in New York every day,” Dr. Weinstein said, “and naturally the majority of those dying now have recently been vaccinated. Every so often, some amateur diagnostician has decided to blame the vaccination, on the old theory of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Not so.” Dr. Weinstein said that two serious complications can arise from vaccination, but both are exceedingly rare. One is tetanus, or lockjaw, of which no cases, of any cause, have been reported here since long before the smallpox scare. The other is a disease of the brain called demyelination encephalomyelitis. Two deaths were attributed to this disease in the last month or so, but autopsies revealed that the diagnosis was wrong in both cases. We told Dr. Weinstein that we’d heard at a cocktail party that overindulgence in alcohol following vaccination had caused a number of fatalities. Dr. Weinstein said that was a new one on him, and without foundation. “What sickness there was consisted of people having sore arms,” he said. “In many of these cases, the people themselves were at fault. They didn’t listen to what we told them and insisted on covering the vaccination with a bandage, which can cause an infection and prevent the scab from forming properly. Encephalomyelitis, however, is something else again. It was a calculated risk, but an infinitesimal one. After all, we were facing a horrible epidemic. We had to deal with a malignant form of the disease, which is fatal to twenty per cent of the adults who contract it and to forty per cent of the children. Vaccination was the only way to head it off.”
Dr. Weinstein told us that his office has been steadily denying rumors ever since the first smallpox cases were tentatively diagnosed on March 28th. One story was that a nurse at a large hospital, where thousands of patients were being vaccinated every day, had just died of smallpox, that the nurse had a roommate who was a teacher, and that after mingling with hundreds of school children she, too, had died. The kernel of truth was that a nurse at the hospital concerned had died of a bad case of measles. She had had no roommate. On one occasion, the Health Department was accused of hushing up the discovery of three hundred cases of smallpox in a single block on the upper West Side. Later, word spread that the block was really in Brooklyn. No truth in either version. Another time, an ambulance picked up a sick man at his home and a patrolman who was on the scene thought he heard an interne say, “Smallpox.” He reported this to his precinct house. A police surgeon was summoned to vaccinate everyone in the station house, reporters got wind of it, and the A.P. put an item on the wire announcing that a new case of smallpox had been detected. The man actually had tonsillitis. Health Department doctors examined some three hundred people suspected of having contracted smallpox who turned out to have something else. Diagnosis of the disease was difficult even for experienced physicians; few New York doctors have ever seen a case.
Dr. Weinstein figures that many of the million and a half people who didn’t respond to the city’s appeal to get vaccinated were already immune and knew it, having had recent vaccinations in the armed forces or otherwise. “Of course, we heard from a number of crackpot anti-vaccinationists,” Dr. Weinstein said. “They’d call up and tell me that as long as a person’s blood was pure, he couldn’t catch smallpox. That would have been a fine rumor to spread around town.” One man said he kept his blood pure by eating carrots. ♦
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