George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was a famous Irish playwright who was known as the leading dramatist of his generation, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. He was also against vaccination, calling it “a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft.”
In 1944, in a letter to the Irish Times, he wrote that:
George Bernard Shaw (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)
Within my long lifetime, its ruthless enforcement throughout Europe ended in two of the worst epidemics of smallpox in record, our former more dreaded typhus and cholera epidemics having meanwhile been ended by sanitation. After that failure, the credit of vaccination was saved for a while by the introduction of isolation, which at once produced improved figures. At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.
Yet the British Government, against the law, has just made vaccination compulsory in the Army by explicitly refusing to discipline an officer who has had an objector forcibly vaccinated; and the House of Commons received the news with cheers. Why does this exploded superstition persist? Simply because our education is not controversial, which means that as it is a hundred years out of date on all open questions, reforms have to come from the uneducated who suffer from the facts and know nothing of the books.
My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.”
— George Bernard Shaw (August 9, 1944, the Irish Times)
LeeF
Christian, Patriot, Entrepreneur. Built ThePatriotConnection,com (Patri-X.com) to unite patriots, empower content creators, educate others, and to crowdsource a true accounting of history.
