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Vaccines and patriotism

Dear Editor,

Try to keep this under your hat. I don’t want this getting out. But I was watching one of those fake news shows the other day and one of their high-hat elitist reporters talked about George Washington mandating vaccines for the men in his Continental Army!

Seriously? How could General GW come up with vaccines for smallpox in 1776 when viruses were not even discovered until 1892? Virology in the 18th century? I don’t think so.

But I was wrong.

The Continental Army was in trouble. A good portion of the Army — 10,000 troops — were in Quebec, ironically under Gen. Benedict Arnold. The devious Brits sent over a pack of infected folks to visit the Colonials and 5,000 quickly came down with smallpox. The Continental task force commander, Major General John Thomas, died of smallpox. He was not alone.

Being depleted, the unit retreated southward in May 1776. Arguably, this defeat preserved the status of the northern British colonies permitting Canada to become the separate country it is today, according to John Adams.

Smallpox became the greatest foe of the Continental Army, killing more men than the British did in the field. General Washington made the call. Based at his headquarters in Morristown, N.J., he ordered a mandatory inoculation for his troops if they had not survived a previous smallpox infection. Yes, but inoculated with what? And this took one serious leap of faith.

Scraped material from mature dried smallpox scabs of infected persons were snorted up the nose or, as was more popular in the Continental Army, were introduced into the bloodstream via a small cut. (Variolation).

And the inoculee got sick. Got smallpox. So much so that the inoculation times had to be done in secret so Washington’s sick army wouldn’t be attacked.

It worked. Only 1% of the persons inoculated died as opposed to 30% of those who contracted smallpox naturally.

Patriots. Fighting for freedom. Taking a mandatory vaccine. Fighting an unknown enemy, a virus that would not be identified for over 100 years.

In researching this story there was no mention of anyone waiting for FDA approval before variolation.

James Spangler, OD

Warren

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