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Vaccination — stimulating the immune system to recognize and fight specific pathogens without causing disease — has saved more lives than any other medical intervention in history. Smallpox vaccination began when Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who got cowpox (a mild disease) didn't get smallpox (a deadly disease) — he inoculated 8-year-old James Phipps with cowpox pus in 1796, then exposed him to smallpox, and he didn't develop it. Smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone and was eradicated globally in 1980 — the only human disease eradicated through vaccination.
The 20th century vaccine revolution: polio vaccine (Salk, 1955 — wild-type polio is 99% eliminated globally); measles, mumps, rubella (MMR); DTP; hepatitis B; HPV (prevents cervical cancer — the first cancer-prevention vaccine); and COVID-19 mRNA vaccines (developed in under a year, unprecedented). The anti-vaccination movement (rooted partly in a fraudulent 1998 Wakefield study, retracted 2010, that falsely linked MMR vaccine to autism) has led to measles outbreaks in countries that had eliminated it.
# Top 10 vaccination facts
- 1Edward Jenner (1796)
- 2Louis Pasteur (rabies vaccine 1885)
- 3Salk polio vaccine (1955)
- 4smallpox eradication (1980)
- 53 million lives saved annually
- 6herd immunity
- 7cold chain logistics
- 8Wakefield fraud (1998, retracted)
- 9COVID mRNA vaccines
- 10next frontiers (HIV, malaria, cancer vaccines)
Fascinating Facts
- ◆Smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century — more than all the wars of that century combined — and was eradicated by 1980 through a global vaccination campaign that traced and vaccinated every contact of every case, the most successful public health campaign in history
- ◆The Wakefield study that claimed MMR vaccines cause autism (1998, The Lancet) was later found to be fraudulent — Wakefield had financial conflicts of interest and manipulated data — but the anti-vaccine movement it spawned has caused thousands of preventable deaths from measles in the 21st century
- ◆Louis Pasteur's rabies vaccine (1885) was first tested on a 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister who had been severely bitten by a rabid dog — the boy survived, and Meister later became the gatekeeper of the Pasteur Institute in Paris
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