Vaccines Work. Don’t Change My Mind.
Because they do. And because you can’t.
With anti-vaccination sentiment running high in recent years, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that the history of vaccinations has been nothing short of a phenomenal success. Looking into the history of vaccines shows how their development was not only a scientific and logistical feat, but also an exercise of the human spirit. It involved many courageous individuals facing off against extremely dangerous diseases they knew very little about at the time. Despite the apparent dangers (and also very gross details), those people basically said: not today, germs. Or not ever, for that matter.
On May 14, 1796, an eight-year-old boy from Gloucestershire in England received what was later proven to have been the first successful modern-day vaccine. He developed an immunity to smallpox as a result. But as a timeline of vaccinations history shows, humans had been experimenting with the idea of given themselves some form of disease to be immune to a harsher form later since the 16th century.
Like other great inventions, the idea of a vaccination was first developed in the East, but later became associated with Western scientific progress and the names of Edward Jenner (who gave that first smallpox vaccine 224 years ago today) and Frenchman Louis Pasteur, who invented the rabies vaccine almost 100 years later.
Neither Pasteur nor Jenner even knew what a virus was at the time they made their discoveries, and neither did people in 16th century China or early 18th century India who were taking scaps and pustule fluids of recently recovered smallpox patients, rubbed them into skin lesions or snorted them up their noses to gain immunity. This practice hadn’t actually changed much by the time Jenner administered the first vaccine (easy, as he coined the term himself). He had scraped pus from the cowpox blisters on a milkmaid’s hands and injected it into the skin of local boy James Phipps. Jenner had observed that milkmaids — being exposed to cowpox — were immune to smallpox and the same happened to Phipps.
Luckily, modern-day immunizations involve fewer gross details. Yet, they still work by the same basic principles to create immunity. The vaccines against tuberculosis, DTP (diphtheria/tetanus/whooping cough) and polio, which were developed between the 1920s and the 1960s, spread around the globe fast. In 1980, only around 20 percent of children in the world were receiving the vaccines. Those rates rose to approximately 80 percent in the ten years up until 1990.
The immunization against hepatitis B, the world’s first genetically modified vaccine, was made available even later, in the 1980s, but also reached a global coverage of 80 percent by 2012.
Vaccines against smallpox ended up being so successful that they made the disease disappear altogether. Numbers from the U.S. show how successful different vaccines were in eradicating or severely limiting the reach of diseases. Smallpox was one of the most feared diseases in the world up until the first part of the 20th century, but today nobody is thinking twice about catching it.
While polio or tuberculosis also have the potential to be eradicated with the help of vaccines, they have not reached that milestone yet. At the moment, between 85–89 percent of children around the world receive TB and polio vaccines within the first year of their lives — a number that has been growing only slowly in the past decade and highlights two more current problems in the world of vaccinations: distribution and misinformation.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988, but after eliminating two out of three strains of the disease in 2015, has hit a wall with the last strain because of political instability in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.
At the same time, another front has been opening up for Polio eradicators: vaccination skepticism. While trying to close vaccination coverage holes in instable countries, others are opening up in countries like Ukraine or the Philippines because of the rejection of vaccines, basically having health officials fight on two fronts.
A lot has certainly changed since the early days of vaccines and receiving one is not as anxiety-inducing (or flat out disgusting) as it once was. In fact it is active participation in one of the big success stories of modern history. And if an 8-year-old in 1796 could have both his arms stabbed repeatedly to receive an experimental immunization made from scabs and pus, then surely all of us can also go and get vaccinated.
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