Data that contradict the Hypothesis

Flu vaccine was invented in 1939, so my impression is that you're implying that other vaccinations created vulnerability to this flu, and are the cofactors in deaths.


The only common vaccine prior to 1918 was Smallpox.

The yellow fever virus was first isolated in 1927. The first attempts at vaccination were made in 1931 in a limited number of people. The first mass inoculation was in 1941 in military personnel in French West Africa.


Typhoid vaccination in the early part of the 20th century was extremely limited. During WWI, almost everyone who received the vaccine was in the military.

It is possible that this vaccination made soldiers more vulnerable to the virus, but why were non-soldiers dying?


South Africa:
20,000 people had been smallpox vaccinated, but approximately half a million died of flu. Proportionally, it was one of the worst countries impacted.
If 500,000 people died of flu, and if 20,000 people had been vaccinated, then 480,000 people who dies were not vaccinated. MAJORITY!



The real question here is:

Are there any data that support the idea that the only people dying were people previously vaccinated? NO.
Are there any data that contradict the idea that the only people dying were people previously vaccinated? YES.



"The only sizable inhabited place with no documented outbreak of the flu in 1918-1919 was the island of Marajo at the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil." [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Flu ].
See this link for further stuff on reconstitution of some of the key viral virulence factors based upon samples taken from frozen victims' lung tissue.

We can assume that the highest concentration of unvaccinated people are in rural areas of Asia and Africa.


Do we have reports about deaths from rural areas (non-vaccinated people)?


We do have some.

South Africa:
20,000 people had been smallpox vaccinated, but approximately half a million died of flu. Proportionally, it was one of the worst countries impacted.


The Spanish Influenza wiped out native villages in Alaska in areas where nobody had been vaccinated for anything.
Some of these villages were utterly wiped out and abandoned.
In fact, there are researchers who are now unearthing some of the interred bodies from that epidemic in order to find the virus and analyze it.


China:
What's convenient about China is that their bureaucracy was very sophisticated, even during WWI. Consequently, Joseph Cha was able to compose an historical list of 'epidemics' in China dating back to 243BC.
William McNeill has updated this with more recent information in Plagues and Peoples (1976).
However, the point is that China registered hundreds of thousands of deaths from flu by April 1918.


Considering that China was largly unvaccinated, the theory that people were dying as a result of vaccination is falling into water.


Like the Black Death, the 1918-19 influenza pandemic disrupted health care systems, even in industrialized countries. In rural areas and in countries with meager medical infrastructure, the pandemic utterly destroyed the health care system. Often, the very people charged with treating and reporting communicable illnesses (i.e. the local doctor) were among the first to die from the influenza. This is yet another explanation for the dearth of reporting from the very areas that, because of their minimal heath care systems, also had little or no vaccination.


Russia?
Most of Russia was unvaccinated.
In Russia, there was another disruptive event occurring at about the same time as the Spanish Flu that might have impaired both reporting and our ability to retrieve records from that time. I am referring, of course, to the Russian Revolution.


China was unvaccinated during 1918-1920.
There were millions of deaths in China, but that information was extremely slow in coming to the attention of the Western world - partly a result of Western ethnocentrism and partly because of the primitive communication infrastructure of rural China.

Ditto for rural Russia.
In 1919, rural China, rural Russia and most of Africa and Central and South America didn't have such things as telegraph, public health departments or even doctors - it was very hard to get any information from those regions at the time (not too easy even today).


What about India?
10 Million Indians died from the Spanish flu, mostly infants.
India at the time had a very low vaccination rate, especially in the rural areas.
Max number of vaccinated people in India would be 2 million.

That means that 8 million unvaccinated Indians died. This breaks the hypothesis that you need to be vaccinated in order to die from flu.

India was blessed (?) with a highly efficient civil service system on the English model which recorded deaths even in the outlying regions.
India had a death rate of 50 per 1000 people, which was among the highest recorded, especially when you consider the size of the population being described.

According to British records, 800,000 Indians had possibly been vaccinated prior to 1914, but vaccine was rationed during the war years, so this would be a maximum, and few infants would have been vaccinated in 1918.


Although about half of the victims of the 1918 epidemic in America were between the ages of 20 and 40,
20% were age ten or younger, and 30% were "older people".
Remember that the average life expectancy in the US was only about 47 years at the beginning of the
20th century, so there weren't as many "older people" as there are today.


On December 24th 1974, the Northern Australian city of Darwin was hit by a massive cyclone (hurricane).
The official death toll was 49 on land and 16 missing at sea.
What went unreported was the loss of entire settlements of aboriginal people. These settlements had no electricity, telephone and often no road in. Transport was by small boat, foot or horse. News of what happened in these communities did not start to filter out until months after the cyclone.
Because these settlements did not keep accurate records (or none could be found after the 200mph+ winds and massive storm surge) they were not included in the official death toll. The unofficial death toll, including aborigines is estimated at 300 - 500.
If this under-reporting can occur in a state capital city of a developed country in the mid 70's you can just imagine how much worse it would be coming from an underdeveloped nation with little communication systems in 1918 - 1919.


When you live in a country where people regularly struggle to find enough to eat, spending hours recording every illness or death ceases to be a priority, let alone having the resources and knowledge to determine the cause of death.

This is just an example that shows how deaths can be under-reported in areas where people are not vaccinated.



The only way that this hypothesis (1918 deaths related to vaccination) works is if you ignore any of the evidence that contradicts it.

In this article, author exaggerates the evidence that supports the point, ignores the evidence that doesn't and possibly fabricates whatever else is needed.

Are vaccines potentially dangerous?

Yes.

But, data is showing that unvaccinated people were dying of flu.



Graeme Kennedy (pro vaccine person) wrote:

"I will go on record as an immunologist saying that vaccinations have absolutely killed people, and this is not a secret. I can provide peer-reviewed citations in the mainstream academic journals that discuss this as part of developing health policies.

The question is: which vaccines have how much risk to what category of the population, and how does it compare to their risk of remaining unvaccinated during epidemic periods?

For example, this is why we do not require smallpox vaccination in Canada, the US, and other countries anymore: the morbidity and mortality rate from vaccination is acknowledged to be greater than that of avoidance."



Just because I am arguing against the idea that only vaccinated people were dying,
I do have my own doubts about vaccination.


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