The video of this post is here.
I recently had the occasion to speak with somebody who said that vaccination had ended childhood death. It was an innocent parroting of the propaganda, particularly for people who have had some kind of biomedical training, which this person did. The person was my age, and I told him that he had measles as a child like I did, nobody died from it that we knew of, and there were no measles vaccines back then. I told him that I didn’t know anybody who died of infectious disease while I grew up, and he didn’t know of anybody either. Then I told him that the measles death rate in the USA declined by 98% between 1900 and 1963, when the measles vaccine was approved (it was more than 99% in England, between 1840 and 1963). Then I asked what did that, and the light kind of came on for him, and he began to mention public sanitation and the like. But he brought up polio as an example of the success of vaccination, and I brought up some of the history of polio, but it didn’t sink in. Americans have the highest medical bills on Earth, by far, and the lowest life expectancy, by far, of all industrial nations, but people like that man can’t quite fathom its cause. One of his gay relatives was killed by AZT, but I can never have that conversation with him, as it would shake his faith in Western medicine.
But that brief polio conversation had me reading up on polio once again, and I decided to make a post about it. I have written about polio plenty previously (1, 2), but I’ll go into a little more depth on this post.
First, however, will be a little preamble, which will be familiar to my readers. I have written at length about the warfare model of masculine medicine. Benjamin Rush, who warned that a medical racket could form in the USA, advocated mercury purgatives, bloodletting, and other barbarities in his era of “heroic” medicine. One of his pupils bled George Washington to death (more than a half-gallon). The man who discovered antiseptic medicine was not only viciously attacked by his peers, but he was involuntarily committed to an insane asylum, where he soon died from the beatings that the asylum staff administered.
Arsenic was known to be poisonous for millennia, but it somehow became Western “medicine.” Mercury was an ingredient in a popular infant-teething powder in the mid-1800s, and the medical literature began noting “infant paralysis.” Mercury was added to that teething powder until my lifetime.
Polio is far from new. Polio was known in Ancient Egypt, but it was a minor curiosity until the late 1800s, when arsenic began to be used in pesticides. The polio virus was a harmless gut virus until then. The first arsenic-based insecticide was Paris green, which was originally a pigment in paint, but it worked great at killing insects. The modern era of polio began when Swedish farming communities began using Paris green on their crops. From the beginning, polio was not like other “infectious” diseases, in that rural communities got it, not cities.
In the 1880s, arsenic was known to attack the nervous system. DDT also attacks the nervous system. Lead arsenate was invented as a less toxic alternative to Paris green, but it also would not wash off of the crops. Lead arsenate was invented and first used in Boston in 1893, to fight the gypsy moth. That year, Boston saw an increase in polio cases, the largest yet seen.
In 1894, a Vermont farming community heard of the new miracle pesticide, began using lead arsenate that farming season, and that “coincided” with the first polio epidemic, as more than 100 people got polio and 18 died. The physician who recorded that first polio outbreak also noted that farm animals became similarly paralyzed. Viral epidemics do not work that way (killing people and chickens), and the common denominator was lead arsenate. Amazingly, nobody made the connection between the new miracle pesticide and the polio that killed both people and farm animals. Swedish physician Ivar Wickman made the case in 1907 that polio was contagious, but he blithely dismissed the anomaly of barnyard animals that got it when people did.
The theories of the day, such as Wickman’s, flew in the face of how infectious diseases were understood. None of the early polio researchers were able to convincingly demonstrate the transmission of polio, and any hint that pesticides might have caused it was studiously ignored. That farming communities got the early polio cases, while cities were spared, was an incongruity that was never explained by Wickman and others. In the 1920s it was noted in scientific circles how nonsensical Wickman’s idea of polio contagion was. From the beginning, physicians noted how polio was not contagious, and in 1951, Archibald Hoyne, a medical school professor, observed that in 35 years of working in the infectious disease wards of Chicago hospitals, no doctor, staff member, or non-polio patient ever contracted polio. Hoyne noted that polio was unknown in China (which didn’t have pesticides). Hoyne also noted the “grab-bag” diagnosis by physicians in the Chicago outbreak in 1916-1917, as they called every illness polio. Hoyne listed 25 diseases that had been called polio.
Livestock were bathed in lead arsenate in those days, to ward off ticks, and there were consequently polio outbreaks traced to the same milk supply. The “germ” polio advocates cited those outbreaks as proof of the germ theory of polio, but ignored the possibility that the milk came from cows that had been bathed in lead arsenate.
That mercury was used as “medicine” for centuries highlights the barbarity of early Western medicine, but it became especially bad in the early 20th century, particularly when robber barons such as Carnegie and Rockefeller got involved. Mercury is used in tooth fillings and vaccines to this day. In the 1920s, lead was added to gasoline, purely for profit purposes, and “scientists” in the pay of the lead interests gave lead a clean bill of health. In 1985, the EPA estimated 5,000 American deaths per year from leaded gasoline, which was not finally removed from gasoline until the 1990s, and lead levels in American bloodstreams then declined precipitously.
Similarly, in 1931, fluoride was finally identified as the cause of tooth damage in children, and for the next decade, efforts were made to remove fluoride from American water supplies. But a scientist who worked under the chairman of ALCOA, which was likely the world’s largest fluoride polluter, began the feat of turning a hazardous industrial waste into compulsory “medicine.” Fluoride is in my tap water to this day. Such interest-conflicted scientists could massage the data to make it say whatever they wanted it to. Those were early examples of why even by today’s defenders of science, biomedical science is seen as the flimsiest and most corrupt branch of science.
All of the evidence that polio was not contagious (from the 1894 Vermont outbreak onward), and that chemical poisoning was the likely culprit, was ignored by scientists who quested after a germ-theory cause. One irony is that paralysis outbreaks were traced to arsenic, such as in Manchester, England, in 1900, when thousands were paralyzed and dozens died. It was quickly traced to arsenic in sulfuric acid used in beer production. The “epidemic” immediately ceased when that sulfuric acid stopped use. In 1930, 50,000 Americans were paralyzed when they drank a patent medicine called Jamaica Ginger, which was traced to a toxic chemical that was used to reduce production costs. So, episodes of chemical paralysis were well known in those days, but polio was somehow exempt from that scrutiny.
In the 1930s, the Journal of the American Medical Association was filled with cigarette ads, which made its editor, Morris Fishbein, a rich man. Fishbein and Anthony Fauci were arguably the two greatest quacks of the past century. Fishbein’s lasting claim to fame was spearheading the “research” and resulting ad blitz for an asbestos cigarette filter, of all things. It is amazing that anybody can have any confidence in Western “medicine” in those days, when the war against polio was fought and won. Fauci’s crowning achievement will be the COVID-19 response, which injured and killed millions, for a disease that he may have helped create.
The exposure of lead arsenate as a deadly human toxin came via muckraking journalists, not establishment science, which actively covered up the damage caused by lead arsenate, on behalf of agricultural interests, abetted by corrupt officials. It took 40 years for lead arsenate to begin to be exposed as a deadly toxin (all pesticides are), but it was not phased out until a new miracle pesticide came onto the market: DDT. But lead arsenate poisons American farmland to this day. The USA had its second wave of polio, which peaked when DDT use did. In the early 1950s, farmers noted that DDT no longer worked like it used to, as insects adapted to it, so it was phased out in the early 1950s. Polio cases “coincidentally” declined at the same time, and by the 1957 national polio vaccine campaign, which was the USA’s first national vaccine campaign, polio deaths had already declined by over 90%. There were more measles deaths than polio deaths in 1957, and measles deaths had already declined by 98% since 1900, which was a decade before measles vaccine campaigns began. But MDs parrot the “vaccines saved us!” lie to this day, like I heard this past week. By the 1970s, according to the CDC, nearly all American polio cases were caused by the polio vaccine.
My sources for this post are largely the chapter on polio in Turtles All the Way Down and The Moth in the Iron Lung. There is also good work on the topic in Dissolving Illusions. In Turtles, the authors discussed 19 “mysteries” of polio, such as the fact that British officers in World War II got polio at five-to-ten times the rate of enlisted men. For 13 of the 19 mysteries, orthodox medicine has no explanation at all, and for the remaining six, orthodoxy’s explanations are nonsensical, but the pesticide-poisoning explanation easily explains all 19 mysteries.
About 20% of polio victims did not even have the polio virus (similar to non-HIV AIDS), and during the tonsillectomy craze, children got bulbar polio, which was within an inch of where their tonsils had been.
Polio, like AIDS, is primarily caused by chemical poisoning, not viruses, but it is virtually impossible to have a productive conversation with those who have been brainwashed by the propaganda, as Western medicine once again barks up the wrong tree. The infectious-disease and degenerative-disease rackets are alive and well, and the vaccine racket is a subsidiary of the infectious-disease racket. The polio mythology is just one of many systematic lies that have been told over the years. Measles mythology is another. Western medicine is good at emergency medicine, which was developed on battlefields, but it is a miserable failure for nearly everything else. In what I call the Fifth Epoch, everybody will live to be 100, they will be healthy the entire way, and medical interventions will be largely unheard of. Until the Fifth Epoch arrives, the global rackets will thrive, and fairy tales such as the polio and measles myths will continue to be told.