As the world awaits the imminent arrival of one — or several — COVID-19 vaccines, many people may wonder how important vaccines actually are to safeguarding public health. In this feature, we answer that question by looking at what vaccines have done for us throughout history.
Researchers who have looked
at trends of vaccine acceptance around the world have found that, overall,
people’s trust in vaccine safety and effectiveness has been on the rise over
the past few years.
However, they have also expressed concern
that the race for a COVID-19 vaccine may have triggered more hesitancy among
certain groups.
Speaking at this year’s WIRED
Health:Tech conference, Prof. Heidi Larson, from the London School of
Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, in the United Kingdom, noted that “Because of
the hyper-uncertainty and the whole environment of trust and distrust around
the COVID vaccine, there are groups that have gotten together to resist”
upcoming vaccination.
Many may now be wondering why researchers are
so keen on vaccines — and whether vaccines have really achieved much for public
health.
So, in this Special Feature, we look at some
key moments in vaccine history and how vaccines have revolutionized public
healthcare.
The ancient
practice of ‘variolation’
Vaccines work by exposing
the immune system to a very small amount of a virus or “information” about a
virus — enough to “teach” it to recognize and react to that pathogen.
The idea of exposing the body to a virus in a
controlled way to “train” it to prevent infection is by no means a modern
conception.
Already in the 1500s, Chinese and
Indian physicians practiced inoculation against the variola virus, which causes
smallpox.
Some accounts from
China in the 1600s suggest that doctors attempted the inoculation by grinding
up smallpox scabs and blowing them into the patient’s nose through a silver
tube.
In Europe, inoculation against smallpox, a
process known as “variolation,” was introduced and popularized by Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu in the early 18th century.
Lady Wortley Montagu was the wife of the
British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. From 1716–1718 she travelled across
Europe to Constantinople, present-day İstanbul, where she learned about
variolation.
She was so impressed by the evidence of its
effectiveness that she submitted her own son for inoculation against the
smallpox virus while in Constantinople and continued to advocate for the
procedure on her return to Britain.
In a letter to a friend,
Lady Wortley Montagu praised the procedure:
“The
small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by
the invention of ingrafting, which is the term [that the Ottomans] give it.
There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation
every autumn. […] Every year, thousands undergo this operation… There is no
example of anyone that has died in it; and you may believe I am well satisfied
of the safety of the experiment.”
The word “vaccine” entered circulation soon
after, when British physician Edward Jenner started experimenting with
different ways of inoculating against variola.
In 1796,
Jenner discovered that exposing people to small quantities of the cowpox virus,
called “vaccinia” or the “vaccine virus,” was safer than exposing them to the
variola virus that infects humans. The cowpox virus was also effective in
preventing smallpox.
Thus, inoculation against the “vaccine virus”
eventually became the umbrella term that we use today: vaccination.
This discovery was truly revolutionary for
public healthcare worldwide, given the disastrous effects that smallpox had
been having for centuries.
The World Health Organization (WHO) call
smallpox “one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity,” as it caused
millions of deaths worldwide over some 3,000 years.
Smallpox was
officially eradicated in 1980, thanks to consistent global programs
of vaccination. On May 8 of that year, the 33rd World Health Assembly made the
historical announcement: “The world and all its peoples have won freedom from
smallpox.”
According to the WHO, in the 20th century alone, smallpox ended the lives of around 300 million people.
Source: Medical News Today
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