Today’s blog was written by Dean, an 8th grade student at the Collegiate School. He has always been interested in medicine, diseases, and how we combat them. Aside from his interest in medicine, he also enjoys Science Olympiad, debate, and theater.
Have you ever been to the doctor? They roll up your sleeve, rub a pungent alcohol wipe on your arm and stick a needle into your veins. Did you ever wonder what was in the needle when they injected it into you? The first vaccines came from smallpox, and they are effective ways of fighting diseases by tricking your body into making memory cells without experiencing symptoms, and they are very safe.
To see what vaccines are, we need to go back to the time of the first vaccines. It’s the late 18th century and disease has ravaged the world. Specifically, smallpox, a deadly disease that attacks the body’s organs directly. The disease was everywhere, and it claimed 400,000 Europeans alone. English physician Edward Jenner was the first to do something about it. He noticed that milk maids who contracted a similar disease called cowpox, did not catch the much deadlier version, smallpox. To prove his hypothesis he took the scabs and blood of an infected woman, and exposed it to a young boy.³ This made him catch cowpox, he got sick, and recovered a few days later. A few weeks after that Jenner returned to the boy’s house and exposed him to smallpox. This time, the boy did not get sick. This proved that cowpox was an effective way to prevent getting smallpox. At first, people doubted Jenner but later they came to the same conclusions. Jenner was named the father of the first vaccine, and later it was used to eradicate smallpox all over the world.
For years vaccines continued to protect people from disease, however there was an ongoing issue. Polio was a big threat in the US and still is in many parts of the world. It kills upwards of half a million people every year. It also crippled thousands of children and adults, including our former president, Franklin. D. Roosevelt, who was confined to a wheelchair for the next half of his life. To combat polio, the March of Dimes came to be. The government asked citizens to donate just a dime for a cure. The movement was met with overwhelming support, they obtained $270,000 (a lot of money back then).¹¹ The government elected two people to come up with polio vaccines and gave them state of the art technology to do so. One of them was Jonas Salk, and he and his team focused on making a vaccine in which that was already dead, and completely safe. Sabin, the other doctor, focused on making a live vaccine instead. After years of work, Dr. Salk created a vaccine that combated polio, and was immediately mass produced, and was administered to and was administered to children all over the United States.
Immediately, the polio cases dropped. However, shortly after the polio vaccine was administered to the public a pharmaceutical company which provided Salk’s vaccine failed to kill the virus. They began giving thousands of kids the polio virus, thus making them very sick, and some even died. It was a devastating loss, and it immediately shifted the public's view on the vaccine. The government shifted to Sabin’s vaccine due to loss of public approval. Sabin's vaccine worked, but it still paralyzed around 8 kids in the US every year. Salk thought this was unacceptable. He worked tirelessly to remove Sabin's oral vaccine from being administered. So, did he succeed?
Yes. After a few more years the government realized the remaining polio cases were from Sabin's vaccine, and it was recalled and replaced by an updated version of Salk's vaccine.
The COVID-19 vaccine alone managed to stop a global pandemic, and we need vaccines more than ever to fight newer diseases like Ebola, hantavirus, and mutated polio.