The New V Word: Vaccines
It’s not a conspiracy, vaccines are here to help.
I’m not super happy writing this article. The basic concept of how vaccines work has been with us for hundreds of years. It’s an idea so simple and works so well, you’d expect it to be pushed out by pseudoscience health nuts and gurus.
But it is without a doubt scientific proof of the adage:
What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.
The basic idea is if we introduce our body to a weaker form of something that we know could kill us, perhaps our body would then become immune to it.
Somehow this very simple process has become extraordinarily convoluted and filled with enough crackpots to fill a ravine.
So let’s go over the very simple idea again. A vaccine is just introducing to your body a fragment, killed, or similar infective particle to make your body capable of fighting off an infection.
Believe it or not, it dates back to the 15th century! Antibiotics are not even that old, but people choke them down in ever-increasing amounts leading to a global antibiotic crisis.
To be fair the 15th-century practice had another name. It was called Variolation, something that’s no longer done. The very first documented method of it was in China. They would take 3 or 4 scabs from someone who had a very mild case and leave them out to try in the sun for some time. This would then be crushed into a very fine powder and blown into the nostril of a child to be inoculated.
Another form of variolation, far more widespread, was also used for smallpox in the 1700s until the first vaccine was introduced. It used material made from the puss of a smallpox scab that, after being prepared over possibly many years, was introduced into a patient’s arm via a fresh cut.
While the practice worked well for individual patients, the problem was that said patient had a live infection of smallpox and it would spread just as quickly from them as it would from someone who caught smallpox naturally. It was also a very involved process. The material itself might not have been created properly. The physician doing the inoculation might not have been the most skilled, leading to poor exposure and leaving no immunity. As such, physicians were always looking for other ways to save their patients.
Several physicians and scientists around the 1770s. It was noticed that women known as milkmaids would come down with a very mild infection of cowpox, but none of them would catch smallpox. Several scientists managed to use this knowledge to inoculate patients against smallpox, but it wasn’t until Edward Jenner tried and wrote about his findings that the world would listen.
Jenner managed to inoculate the 8-year-old son of his gardener, James Phipps, with cowpox and once recovered, tried inoculating him with smallpox to see if it would work. Luckily for all of us (and most definitely the boy), he remained healthy. Future exposure to smallpox proved that James was indeed immune to it. Looking at the watercolor images above, you can clearly see how bad variolation could be compared to Jenner’s approach.
Jenner named his new procedure vaccination, derived from the Latin name for cow, vacca. For his troubles, James Phipps would later be given a house and small land by Jenner.
For the past 220 years, humanity has used vaccines in one form or another. Inoculation as a whole is much older. There’s no mystery or magic to it. There’s no sinister plot. Exposure to introduce immunity, or to train your immune system. That’s what vaccines do. Today’s vaccines are far more effective and safer than ever before.
This is the 6th article in my medical series about infections. This is an introduction for vaccines. Next week I’ll discuss modern vaccines and touch on what makes the Covid-19 vaccines different. If you haven’t read my other articles, they’re listed below.
