This photo showing two 13-year-old children with smallpox is genuine -

Tom Hollmann

  • To extol the benefits of the vaccination act, numerous social media posts have featured a photo showing two children supposedly infected with smallpox.

    The first, unvaccinated, is covered with pustules.

    The second, vaccinated, is spared the disease.

  • However, many users have questioned the veracity of this photograph, which for them would only be a photomontage.

  • It was, however, taken by Doctor Allan Warner, of the Isolation Hospital in Leicester, and published in the

    Atlas of Clinical Medicine, Surgery, and Pathology 

    in 1901.

In the 1800s, it killed one in ten children in France.

Smallpox, officially eradicated in 1980 following a massive vaccination campaign organized by the World Health Organization (WHO), is one of the illustrations of the benefits of the vaccine on the population.

While only 56% of French people are now ready to be vaccinated against Covid-19 according to a survey ** published by franceinfo, many Twitter and Facebook users have shared a photograph comparing two children with smallpox in early twentieth century to extol the benefits of the vaccination act.

This photo was taken in 1901 by Dr Allan Warner at Laicester Hospital (UK).

Shows us on the left an unvaccinated child who contracted smallpox;

and on the right another who received the vaccine against the same disease.

1/2 pic.twitter.com/WI0K8d5LDo

- Vanina Armani (@VaninaArmani) December 29, 2020

According to this Twitter user, this photograph "taken by Dr Allan Warner at Leicester Hospital (United Kingdom)" shows, on the left, an unvaccinated child with a face covered with pustules, and on the right, a vaccinated child, spared the except for a few small buttons on the forehead.

“Photomontage” or “it's bogus”, several users have expressed their skepticism as to the authenticity of this photograph.

FAKE OFF

This shot is authentic.

It was produced by Dr Allan Warner, a practitioner at Isolation Hospital in Leicester, UK, at the turn of the 20th century, as an article by the Snopes review media published in 2018 demonstrated. The doctor took a series of photographs aimed at observing the evolution of smallpox in infected patients, some having previously been vaccinated and others not.

These photos were published in the

Atlas of Clinical Medicine, Surgery, and Pathology 

in 1901. The photograph in question, of the two children side by side, is accompanied by this caption: "Shows two children, both 13 years old. .

The one on the right was vaccinated during childhood, the other was not.

They were both infected from the same source on the same day.

Note that the one on the left is at a totally pustular stage of the disease, while the one on the right has only one or two pimples that have already dried and formed scabs ”.

We have a lot of photographs in our collection, but this is perhaps the most iconic.

Both boys were exposed to smallpox, but only the boy on the right had previously been vaccinated.

The photograph, taken by a doctor working in Leicester, was first published in 1901 #PhotoMW pic.twitter.com/BrYFRLtnBG

- Dr Jenner's House (@DrJennersHouse) May 18, 2019

A cliché used to illustrate the history of anti-vaccination movements

In 1906, the

Scottish Medical and Surgical Journal

recognized the importance of Allan Warner's work in understanding smallpox, as well as vaccination.

"(...) We are particularly impressed by this series of photographs showing the benefits of vaccination through a method of showing two individuals side by side having been infected by the same source", wrote the Scottish medical journal, as reported. Snopes.

Although developed at the end of the 18th century, by Edward Jenner, whom some consider to be the father of immunology, the smallpox vaccine did not know a global distribution until the 1980s and the mass vaccination campaign of the 'WHO.

In the 18th century, scientists were already facing pressure from the anti-vaccine movements.

Professor Gareth Williams, president of the Jenner Trust and specialist in smallpox, meanwhile used the famous photograph in a lecture dating from 2011 to illustrate the division of the British population around the vaccination act.

**: 

This survey was carried out by Odoxa-Backbone consulting for franceinfo and Le Figaro on January 13 and 14, 2021 by Internet, with a sample of 1,003 French people representative of the French population aged 18 and over.

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