The Original Vaccine Wasn’t a Vaccine

For my own part, it is long since I have positively refused to vaccinate at any price. I maintain that vaccination is a bauble, gilded over, indeed, by Act of Parliament, but which is a bauble still, with which doctors rock—too often to a fatal sleep—the gullible children of the world.[1]

— Dr. A. H. Carron, Paris, France, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour,
Letter to Dr. Caplin, Portman Square, London, 1883

In June 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rendered a significant decision in the case of Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Los Angeles Unified School District. The case revolved around the district’s policy mandating COVID-19 vaccination for employees, with non-compliance resulting in termination.

What was the basis of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s argument for compulsory vaccination? In 1905, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that the government had an interest in mandating the smallpox vaccine. It was claimed that mandatory smallpox vaccinations were enacted to protect the public because the vaccines were thought to stop the spread of smallpox. In a talk, Professor Michele Bratcher Goodwin, the co-faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, affirmed the belief that the 1905 ruling gave the government the absolute authority to impose vaccination on the population in the name of “public health and safety.”

Mandatory vaccination is constitutional. It's something that has been constitutional in our country since the Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision and even before our own constitution dating back to 1738, we've had the upholding of quarantine and other measures to protect the public's health. The legality of compulsory vaccination is not a matter that is in question. 1905, the Supreme Court held that state compulsory vaccination laws are constitutional when they are necessary for public health and for public safety… In the years since then the court has affirmed the constitutionality of state compulsory vaccination laws in case like Zucht v. King which upheld childhood vaccination requirement for entrance to public schools. In fact compulsory vaccination laws have existed in the United States in some form since the 19th century.[2]

The Los Angeles Unified School District argued that the COVID-19 vaccines were similar to the original smallpox vaccine in that they would stop the spread of the disease. However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the COVID-19 vaccine does not stop the spread of COVID-19 and, therefore, is not a vaccine in the traditional sense but rather a medical treatment. Because the COVID-19 injection is a medical treatment and not a vaccine, the 1905 ruling to make smallpox vaccinations mandatory does not apply, and thus, there is no basis for requiring someone to get it.

Addressing the merits, the panel held that the district court misapplied the Supreme Court’s decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), in concluding that the Policy survived rational basis review. Jacobson held that mandatory vaccinations were rationally related to preventing the spread of smallpox. Here, however, plaintiffs allege that the vaccine does not effectively prevent spread but only mitigates symptoms for the recipient and therefore is akin to a medical treatment, not a “traditional” vaccine. Taking plaintiffs’ allegations as true at this stage of litigation, plaintiffs plausibly alleged that the COVID-19 vaccine does not effectively “prevent the spread” of COVID-19. Thus, Jacobson does not apply.[3]

However, what hasn’t been examined was whether the foundation for the ruling in the 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts case was based on facts. Keep in mind that during this time, many wrongheaded notions were considered acceptable and lawful, such as the sterilization of supposedly intellectually inferior people due to now-recognized erroneous eugenic theories. It’s this idea of protecting the “public good” through vaccination that helped to justify eugenical sterilization laws.

In a landmark 1926 case, Buck v. Bell, the United States Supreme Court upheld Virginia's sterilization laws in an 8 to 1 decision. This ruling endorsed the argument that the state's interest in maintaining a “pure” gene pool outweighed individual rights. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. invoked compulsory vaccination to justify the verdict regarding sterilization laws.

It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.[4]

[Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, Harry H. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, 1922]

Eugenicists promoted and advocated for laws to sterilize individuals whom they deemed genetic defectives in society. State governments established medical boards to determine who would undergo sterilization. These boards assessed whether individuals were likely to have children who could inherit idiocy, insanity, feeblemindedness, or a predisposition to criminality.[5] Consequently, thousands of people were forcibly sterilized.

Before 1933 a number of countries had the legal power to prevent manifestly unfit individuals from procreating offspring, but sterilization was applied on a very small scale. In the United States by January 1, 1937, only 25,403 persons had been sterilized, most of them in California.[6]

The 1905 court did not consider what the original smallpox vaccine was, examine whether it actually stopped the spread of smallpox, or determine whether the vaccine was safe. They undoubtedly accepted the word of medical "experts" without conducting any independent research. In 1889, Dr. Charles Creighton, MD, a professor at the University of Cambridge, noted that the compulsory vaccination laws were based solely on the "warrant of medical authority.”

It is difficult to conceive what will be the excuse for a century of cow-poxing; but it cannot be doubted that the practice will appear in as absurd a light to the common sense of the twentieth century as blood-letting now does to us. Vaccination differs, however, from all previous errors of the faculty, in being maintained as the law of the land on the warrant of medical authority. That is the reason why the blow to professional credit can hardly help being severe, and why the efforts to ward it off have been, and will continue to be so ingenious.[7]

The blind trust in those perceived as having medical authority drove compulsory vaccination laws for many decades, followed later by eugenical sterilization laws. Today, while forced sterilization laws are widely condemned as abhorrent, forced vaccination remains broadly accepted.

So, what was the first smallpox vaccine?

The commonly repeated tale of the first vaccine goes something like this: Among milkmaids, a rumor circulated that infection with cowpox could protect against smallpox. In 1796, Edward Jenner, believing these stories, experimented on an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps. He extracted disease matter believed to be cowpox from lesions on the hands of dairymaid Sarah Nelmes and vaccinated James with it. Later, the child was intentionally exposed to smallpox to test the protective effect of the cowpox inoculation. When James did not contract smallpox, it was assumed that the cowpox vaccination was successful and would provide lifelong protection against smallpox. On March 17, 1802, Jenner petitioned the House of Commons, asserting that vaccination was completely safe, conferred lifelong immunity, and could eradicate smallpox from the world.[8] Over the following decades, vaccination became widespread, saving us from smallpox. Smallpox vaccination would go on to “save billions of lives.”[9]

That your petitioner having discovered that a disease which occasionally exists in a particular form among cattle, known by the name of cow-pox, admits of being inoculated [vaccinated] on the human frame with the most perfect ease and safety, and is attended with the singularly beneficial effect of rendering through life the person so inoculated perfectly secure from the infection of small-pox... [vaccination] has already checked the progress of small-pox, and, from its nature, must finally annihilate that dreadful disorder.[10]

Yet, this tale is far from the truth.

The procedure Edward Jenner created was originally called cowpoxing and later renamed vaccination based on the Latin for cow “vacca.” But actually, Jenner believed the disease originated from the running sores of sick horses’ heels, a condition called the grease.[11] Over the years, various animals were used for vaccines, as well as material from lesions of smallpox victims or corpses that were then scratched onto cows. As time passed, many animals came into the picture, with their pus and blood being used as the so-called “virus” material. This included cows, horses, goats, pigs, sheep, mules, asses, buffalos, and rabbits.

When we recall that vaccine lymph is derived, in the first place, either from a smallpox corpse, the ulcerated udder of a cow, or the running sores of a sick horse’s heels, the choice depending upon the country of its origin and the firm which manufactures it, it is hardly to be wondered at that it has far-reaching ill effects on the human constitution. Years ago, the Lancet declared that “no practitioner knows whether the lymph he employs is derived from smallpox, rabbit-pox, ass-pox, or mule-pox.”[12] Our own Ministry of Health has long confessed to complete ignorance of the ultimate source of its own supply of lymph; but last year Dr. A. Downie stated in the British Medical Journal that “the strain of vaccinia virus used for the routine preparation of lymph in this country [England] is believed to have been derived from a case of small-pox in Cologne during the last century.” That, of course, disposes of the whole theory of cow-pox vaccination.[13]

In 1836, by inoculation of variolous virus [smallpox], Dr. Thiele, of Kasan, produced “the genuine vaccine disease.” With this he vaccinated, through seventy-five transmissions, more than three thousand human beings.

In 1839, Ceely, of England, induced “vaccine vesicles in two young heifers… by inoculation of variolous lymph,” and thus established vaccine-stock, which formed the basis of thousands of vaccinations.

In 1840, Mr. Badcock, of Brighton, England, succeeded in small-poxing a cow, and derived therefrom a stock of “genuine vaccine lymph.” He has since repeated the experiment about six hundred times, succeeding in thirty-seven cases. The vaccine virus thus obtained has been supplied to many hundreds of practitioners, and tens of thousands of vaccinations have been performed with it.[14]

For a whole century, this perplexing concoction of materials was used for vaccination, passed from one person’s arm to another’s (arm-to-arm vaccination), mixed with various yeast, fungus, bacteria, and whatever else resided on each individual’s skin and in their blood. Dr. T. V. Gifford noted this vaccine reality in 1888.

It is a convenient habit of vaccinators to speak of vaccinations as uniform, as if the virus of the rite were as definite as a drop of water, a pinch of salt, or a grain of gold. Nothing could be further from the truth. The virus called vaccine is not one but various, not uniform but multiform, not certain but uncertain with an uncertainty which in transit from body to body, ad infinitum, can be predicted nor ascertained… The matter of his lancet he cannot define and its effects he cannot foresee... To these Jennerian stocks have been added Smallpox Cowpox obtained by inoculating cows with the virus or pus of human smallpox. Thus we have virus derived from horse grease cowpox, from natural or spontaneous cowpox, from horsepox, and from smallpox cowpox, plus the constitutional taints of the generations of vaccinifers [the person from whom the vaccine was derived in the former practice of arm-to-arm vaccination] through which these diverse poxes have been passed; and which is which, and how modified for better or for worse in the course of travel none can tell. [15]

George William Winterburn, PhD, MD, also noted that the composition of any particular vaccine was completely unknown and a “haphazard game with chance” for everyone vaccinated.

It will thus be seen what slight foundation the whole question of vaccinal virus rests. Millions of vaccinations are made every year, and nobody knows what they are made with. The whole process is a haphazard game with chance. Vaccination was accepted on the simple dictum of Jenner that it would stamp out smallpox. The medical profession of today buys its vaccinal virus of those who make merchandise of it on their simple dictum that it is the right thing to use...[16]

[Small Pox & The First Vaccine: The graphic depicts the many sources of what was termed the “vaccine virus.” Millions were inoculated with pus and blood, mixed with bacteria and fungi, from various animals and corpses, and passed through from one person to another in arm-to-arm vaccination.]

Did the smallpox vaccine stop the spread of smallpox? It’s hard to imagine that this medical concoction of ingredients is healthy or is capable of mitigating smallpox or its spread. Over the many decades, numerous doctors found that vaccination does not protect against smallpox. Worse yet, many doctors observed the spread of other diseases from vaccination, such as syphilis, leprosy, and tuberculosis, making the smallpox vaccine worse than ineffective.

…it surely would be unreasonable to expect the public should continue their patronage and confidence, when their safety is positively and confessedly in the greatest danger; and it would be downright madness to imagine they ought, or will continue to adopt vaccination, as a defence against small-pox, when experience has proved that no one who trusts to that practice is protected, or his life safe against the variolous epidemic, but must fly from it for safety; and more especially when even now, seven or eight of every hundred vaccinated cases have, for some years past, fallen a prey to small-pox, which exceeds twenty times the number that died from inoculation with small-pox; and also, as far as present experience goes, much above a half of all who have placed their security in vaccination have undergone an attack of small-pox, and that there is no security for any one who has undergone vaccination, as a protection against the variolous epidemic.[17] — Thomas Brown, Surgeon, Musselburgh, Scotland

I am convinced that Vaccination is the greatest mistake and delusion in the science of medicine; a fanciful illusion in the mind of the discoverer; a phenomenal apparition devoid of scientific foundation, and wanting in all the conditions of scientific possibility.[18]

When one has treated hundreds of cases of small-pox, both under sporadic and epidemic conditions, through many years and at all seasons, one comes to the decided conclusion that vaccination has not the remotest effect on the outbreak, course, or issue of the disease.[19] — Dr. Joseph Hermann, Head Physician to the Imperial Wiede Hospital, Vienna, Austria, from 1858 to 1864

There really exists no change in the virulent character of the small-pox, notwithstanding the vaccination laws; and of those attacked by the disease, at least TWO-THIRDS WERE SATISFACTORILY VACCINATED. I have not the least confidence in vaccination; it often transfers filthy and dangerous disease without offering and protection whatever.[20] — William Job Collins, MD, twenty-five years public vaccinator, London, England

After fifty years’ experience, I arrived at the conclusion that vaccination was not only useless as a preventative, but dangerous. I decline the risk of vaccination, and would not vaccinate my bitterest enemy. — Speech, April 17^th, 1883[21],[22] — Thomas Brett, MD, London, England

We have at our command testimonies—scores of testimonies—proving beyond any possible doubt that men unvaccinated have nursed small-pox patients in hospitals at different times, for years, and never took the disease, while on the other hand we have, with the dates and figures, the most positive proof that those who had been vaccinated—vaccinated two and three times—took the disease when exposed, and died there-from. These facts are undeniable.[23] — J. M. Peebles, MD, MA, PhD

I oppose vaccination, because forty years of practice has convinced me vaccination does not afford the least protection or mitigation from smallpox.[24] — Dr. A. M. Ross

…from his study and experience of the ill effects and fallacies of vaccination, and that vaccination not only induces a great many diseases in the person vaccinated, but that it does not in any respect prevent the person so vaccinated from taking smallpox and in a great number of cases has been the direct cause of the death of the person operated upon, besides often leaving persons operated on, but not actually killed, physical wrecks.

Deponent further says that he believes that vaccination is a curse to humanity and a superstition as baneful as was witchcraft. Deponent further more believes and advises the petitioner in the above entitled action that it would be wrong for him to endanger the present good health of his son, William C. Viemeister, by allowing said son to submit to the operation of vaccination, because deponent from his deductions as a medical man believes that a person is healthier and is better fortified to withstand disease of any kind who has never been vaccinated, and that by the operation of vaccination, one takes upon himself the risk of endangering and menacing the health and life of the individual upon whom such an operation would be performed.[25] — Dr. Montague R. Leverson, MD, MA, PhD, Staten Island, NY

From the “History of the Reign of Queen Victoria,” an English work published in the year 1900, I quote the following extract: “Official statistics prove that twenty-six thousand [26,000] children have been annually slaughtered by the poisoned lancets of public vaccinators, and one hundred thousand injured yearly by invaccinated diseases.” Bear in mind that this appalling “slaughter of the innocents” by the medical Herods is stated to have taken place in the British possessions alone during the reign of the late Queen Victoria.

In view of this terrible slaughter of children by the vaccine lancet in the British kingdom, what must be the aggregate number of helpless children who are annually immolated on the altar of the vaccine idol in all the Jennerized countries of the world?...

In the “English Digest of Parliamentary Returns,” No. 488, session of 1878, entitled, “Vaccination Mortality,” I find recorded this appalling statement: “Twenty-five thousand children are slaughtered annually by disease inoculated into the system by vaccination, and a far greater number are injured and maimed for life by the same unwholesome rite.”[26] — J. W. Hodge, MD, Niagara Falls, New York

Closely allied to these, as causes of disease, are the poisonous drugs administered as medicines. And it must not be forgotten that syphilis, scrofula, and probably every kind of blood-poison can be taken by vaccination, which, so far from being a protection against small-pox, seems to have been one of the chief causes of the late epidemics. It is never safe to take matter from another body into our own. We risk taking all its diseases. There is no doubt thousands have been mortally poisoned by vaccination, made compulsory by law upon the whole population. Apparently healthy children have scattered hereditary syphilis, and perhaps, even worse diseases...[27] — Thomas Low Nichols, MD

In India, since the introduction of compulsory vaccination, leprosy has increased 25 per cent; and in this country consumption has increased 35 per cent. cancer 50 per cent. and skin diseases 270 per cent; What man wants to risk of having some loathsome and ineradicable disease germs introduced into his body, or into the body of his child, under the pretence that it will render them immune from an attack of small-pox? [28] — Dr. Van V. Blighton

[“The above photographs are of Miss Fannie Lent, of Cincinnati, Ohio. She was vaccinated when a child, and thereafter became a mass of running sores. She visited Zion City a few years ago, and has since died. She suffered the tortures of hell, and was a sight that would melt a heart of stone. These pictures tell the story of what vaccination can do, and has done in thousands of cases. The time has come to down the dirty doctors, and drive vaccination back to hell where it came from.”[29]]

So it’s clear that Edward Jenner’s original claim of vaccination being performed with “the most perfect ease and safety, and… with the singularly beneficial effect of rendering through life the person so inoculated perfectly secure from the infection of small-pox...” was nothing more than a fantastical tale that the medical profession had quickly and unwaveringly seized.

The very bedrock of vaccination is fundamentally flawed and supported by unwarranted laws based on so-called ‘medical authority.’ The original vaccine was concocted from the sores of various animals and the lesions of smallpox victims' corpses, passed from arm to arm over 100 years. Far from halting the spread of smallpox, it tragically caused thousands of injuries and deaths.

The audacious idea that lawmakers, propelled by their own biases and agendas, possess the authority to legislate over our bodily autonomy is an egregious overreach that should never have been tolerated and must be decisively eradicated.

Parts of this article are from our new books available at https://dissolvingillusions.com

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[1] Mr. R. Lee Bliss, “Vaccination:—ought it to be compulsory?” The Students’ Journal and Hospital Gazette, June 16, 1883, p. 256.

[2] https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/1806733452273975393

[3] Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Los Angeles Unified School District, June 7, 2025, p. 3.

[4] Henry E. Sigerist, Civilization and Disease, 1943, Cornell University Press, New York, p. 105.

[5] Harry Hamilton Laughlin, DSc, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, December 1922, Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, pp. 19–20.

[6] Henry E. Sigerist, Civilization and Disease, 1943, Cornell University Press, New York, p. 106.

[7] Charles Creighton MD, Jenner and Vaccination. A Strange Chapter of Medical History, 1889, Swan Sonnenschein & Co., p. 354.

[8] John Baron, The Life of Edward Jenner, pp. 490–491.

[9] Science: The Definitive Visual Guide, 2009, DK Publishing, p. 156.

[10] John Baron, The Life of Edward Jenner, pp. 490–491.

[11] “Observations by Mr. Fosbroke,” The Lancet, vol. II, 1829, pp. 583–584.

[12] “Studies in Vaccinia,” The Lancet, vol. 199, no. 5150, May 13, 1922,
pp. 957–958.

[13] M. Beddow Bayly, MRCS, LRCP, “Inoculation Dangers to Travelers,” speech at the Caxton Hall Westminster, October 2, 1952. Published by the London and Provincial Anti-Vivisection Society.

[14] George William Winterburn, PhD, MD, The Value of Vaccination: A Non-partisan Review of Its History and Results, 1886, F.E. Boericke, Philadelphia, pp. 37–38.

[15] Dr. T. V. Gifford, “What is Vaccination,” Journal of Hygeio-Therapy, vol. II, no. 8, August 1888, p. 178.

[16] George William Winterburn, PhD, MD, The Value of Vaccination: A Non-partisan Review of Its History and Results, 1886, F.E. Boericke, Philadelphia, pp. 42–43.

[17] Thomas Brown of Musselburgh, Surgeon, An Investigation of the present Unsatisfactory and Defective State of Vaccination, 1842, pp. 136–137.

[18] Anti-vaccination. The Statistics Exposed and Refuted, Leeds, 1876, p. 2.

[19] Robert A. Gunn, MD, “The Truth About Vaccination,” The Sanitarian: A Monthly Magazine, vol. XXVII, 1891, New York, p. 552.

[20] “Compulsory Vaccination,” Homeopathic Envoy, vol. XVI, no. 11, January 1906, pp. 84–86.

[21] Robert A. Gunn, MD, “The Truth About Vaccination,” The Sanitarian: A Monthly Magazine, vol. XXVII, 1891, New York, pp. 553–554.

[22] Terrible Results of Vaccination: TESTIMONIES concerning Vaccination and its Enforcement: by Scientists, Statisticians, Philosophers, Publicists, and Vaccine Physicians, 1892, Providence, Snow & Farnham, Printers, p. 33.

[23] J. M. Peebles, MD, MA, PhD, Vaccination a Curse and a Menace to Personal Liberty, Tenth Edition, 1913, p. 8.

[24] “Vaccination,” The Theocrat, vol. VI, no. 41, November 22, 1919.

[25] Order to Show Cause. N. Y. SUPREME COURT, KINGS COUNTY, In the Matter of The Application of Edmund C. Viemeister for a Peremptory Writ of Mandamus, Patrick J. White, President of the Board of Education, and F. H. Meade, Principal of Public School No. 12. Borough of Queens Supreme Court: Appellate Division-Second Department, 1903, pp. 11–16.

[26] Life, vol. 59, no. 1536, April 4, 1912, pp. 712, 718.

[27] Thomas Low Nichols MD, Esoteric Anthropology (The Mysteries of Man), 1873, p. 186, 192.

[28] “Vile Vaccination,” The Vegetarian Magazine, November 1909, vol. XIII, no. 3, p. 15.

[29] “Vaccination,” Leaves of Healing, January 2, 1915, vol. XXXV, No. 14, p. 313.,