There are around 70+ companies working on a vaccine for COVID-19 (Corona Virus) right now. It’s quite interesting to note that we have only ~22 vaccines available around the world .. for example we don’t have vaccines for malaria, Nipa virus etc but do have treatments for them. I was quite curious on the concept of vaccination and decided to research and see what’s up with this. Aided by wikipedia and research on the internet, I think it’s a very interesting history to the evolution of the vaccine.
THE GREEK CONNECTION
In fact the seeds for a vaccine probably started from 460 BC when a noted historian and writer (Thucydides) saw that some people became ill from the plague which was prevalent then and recovered and could tend to other sick without falling sick again.
THE CHINA CONNECTION
Fast forward to the middle ages and Plague, Smallpox were the major diseases which ravaged the world and at one point 1 out of every 3 were dying due to the disease in some regions of the world. In china which was very high in terms of trade and was on the famed silk route, it was found that some people who got the small pox would recover and not fall sick again with the small pox and it was found that taking pus from a scab of an infected patient , Grinding the pus and the scab, taking the mixture onto cotton wool and placing it into a tube and allowing people to inhale the mixture seemed to indicate that people would not contract the small pox infection.
It was also found that as more people inhaled and became immune , the contagiousness of the disease seemed to go down. The only challenge with this approach was the spread of disease was significant and this approach was cumbersome. This was probably the first instance of inoculation. This approach spread through the Silk route through traders and an evolution of the model happened where they would use a needle to scrape some of the PUS and make superficial scratches on the skin of a healthy person to prevent them from contracting the disease or have them suffer through a milder infection. Eventually, after about two to four weeks, these symptoms would subside, indicating successful recovery and immunity. The method was first used in China and the Middle East before it was introduced into England and North America in the 1720s.
THE ENGLAND CONNECTION
Lady Mary Montagu was a writer and traveler and wife of the ambassador and was suffering through smallpox, a.k.a. “the speckled monster,” a disease that in her day( the early 18th century) was the deadliest on earth, eventually wiping out more people than the Black Plague. She wrote “ I am going to tell you a thing, that will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless. . . . There is a set of old women, who make it their business to perform the operation, every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer her, with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after that, binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell” . . . She had observed what today we would call an inoculation.
Lady Montagu comes back to England, meets King George the 1st and requests him to have a trial of this approach done. The King orders the first field trial and selects death row inmates for the field trial of using pus cells on a needle on the inmates. The arrangement was that if the death row inmates fell sick , there was nothing which could be done but if they survived, they would be freed from death row. This was also a pivotal point in the history of field trials and is also known as the "ROYAL EXPERIMENTS”. In 1746 the official smallpox inoculation hospital was founded and soon small pox inoculation became a rich man’s affair and became a LUXURY GOOD with many doctors adding a lot of other aspects to the inoculation including asking patients to starve for a week and other bells and whistles.
It soon dawned that there was a need for a better vaccination, simultaneously dairy farmers in England saw pustules forming on the Udder of cows and found that humans contracting the cow pox did not suffer much and that it was a much milder type of disease. They also found that Milk Maids who get cow pox due to milking of the cows and coming into contact with the pustules would not get afflicted by small pox.
A doctor by the name of Dr. Edward Jenner who was a practicing physician in England surmised that instead of taking the pus from the udder of the cow and using it on humans as a form of inoculation decided that taking the pus from an infected milk maid might be a better solution since it was a human-human process and thus the cow pox vaccine was born.
Dr.Jenner is often called a pioneer of immunisation. Using a method valid in immunology before the discovery of germ theory, his work saved many lives. To be more precise, for every 14 people Jenner saved, he accidentally killed one. In Jenner’s time, smallpox killed around 10% of the British population, with the number as high as 20% in towns and cities where infection spread more easily.
Dr.Jenner takes the pus from the milk maid Sarah Nelms and scrapes in onto the arm of a 8 year old boy James Phipps and thus exposed the boy to the small pox disease but the child did not die and had survived(not sure how ethical this was but remember it was the late 1700’s). Dr. Jenner then publishes a paper on his findings in 1798 and this the first vaccine was found. Dr. Jenner called it Variolae Vaccinae (smallpox of the cow) and that’s how the first vaccine of the world came into being. In 1821, he was appointed physician extraordinary to King George IV, and was also made mayor of Berkeley and justice of the peace.
AND THAT IS HOW MY FRIENDS THE FIRST VACCINE WAS BORN ... Be safe and be healthy and have a good weekend
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