Mère and Sri Aurobindo
- ON VACCINES -

In 1978, an Indian doctor (who graduated in medicine in England, from the University of Edinburgh), published a book entitled "Memorable Contacts with The Mother". His name is Nirodbaran (1903-2006), better known by the diminutive Nirod; starting from 1933 he took up residence in the city of Puducherry (then it was called Pondichéry and was a French colony), in Tamil Nadu (South India); in the 1940s, Nirod was one of Sri Aurobindo's personal secretaries. In the aforementioned book he transcribes his memoirs regarding his relationship with Mère. We report a passage in which Nirod pauses to briefly describe what happened in the Thirties on the occasion of a wave of smallpox that prompted the French government to put pressure on the entire citizenship vaccinated.

"The last medical episode about which I had a long lively discussion ostensibly with Sri Aurobindo but really with the Mother prompting him from behind, was regarding vaccination. Vaccination invaded, like the plague, the calm atmosphere of the Ashram at the behest of the French Government. Sri Aurobindo wrote: “There is an official order from the Government department and we can’t contemptuously waive it aside — we can only minimise its incidence”. It appeared to be a greater evil than the smallpox itself which it was supposed to prevent and we had to face a lot of trouble, inconvenience, difficulties in order to meet the Government’s demand. Sri Aurobindo’s opinion about vaccination was that “it is a very nasty affair, this vaccination”. When I asked him, “You seem to be G.B. Shaw in matters of vaccination, Sir. Do you deny its benefits?” He replied, “Have not denied partial effectivity though complete it is not, since it has to be renewed every year, as you say. The whole Pasteurian affair is to me antipathetic — it is a dark and dangerous principle however effective…”
And this “dark and dangerous” practice was foisted upon us by the authorities asking the whole institution of about 200 members, as well as servants, to undergo vaccination! The Mother and Sri Aurobindo had to apply all their supramental ingenuity to sacrifice as few victims as possible “on the sacred altar of science, so that Valle (French doctor) can say with satisfaction “Ah, ha! The Ashram has been vaccinated!”. The entire long correspondence on this affair, when published, will show with what minute care the Mother considered the health of all the members and how thorough she was in all the details. As a piece of writing, these letters are brilliant with wit, satire and at the same time perspicacity as regards practical directions. It was a wonder that there were minimum possible reactions compared to the number of people subjected to vaccination. That was because of the Mother’s force that acted as a bulwark against untoward consequences. Sri Aurobindo wrote to me, “Whom are you vaccinating? Mother wants to have the report everyday”. It meant that the Mother would put her force on the eve of the vaccination in order that the reaction could be reduced to a minimum."

Since Nirod has called into question the writer George Bernard Shaw (1856-1959), we insert a few quotes. We remind that G.B. Shaw (Nobel Laureate 1925) had a degree in medicine.
"Vaccination is nothing more than attempted murder.”
"If we could know all the cases of deaths caused by vaccinations in the whole world, their number would make Herod himself tremble.”
"Vaccination is a particularly abject witchcraft operation.”
“At the moment [1944], intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law oblige them to do so. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human species by smallpox; on the contrary, today more people are killed by vaccination than by smallpox.“
G. B. Shaw