Vaccination Is Not As New As It Seems: Development Of Vaccination And Public Attitudes

What Triggered The Emergence Of Vaccines?

The core and meaning of each epoch are determined by certain technological achievements, scientific and cultural advances, and, of course, changes in public perception and acceptance of current innovations taking place in society. Humanity transforms with time, but while ancient ignorant nomads turned into orderly law-abiding, self-sustaining communities, the nature of human psychology and physiology remains the same. What caused pain a millennium ago can still cause pain at the present time, especially when it comes to little children.

Where our ancestors relied on supernatural forces to solve existential and practical questions while we are surrounded by computers, one thing remains the same: infections still threaten our lives. For centuries, millions of lives have been taken by ferocious epidemics of different infections, devastating the hearts of inconsolable mothers whose children perished from contagious diseases. Fortunately nowadays, the majority of such deaths are preventable owing to a priceless tool, a tool that enabled the body to fight diseases itself: vaccination.

As an appalling number of deaths and post infectious disabilities led early scientists to believe that it was time to do something about it, the era of artificial immunization was launched.

My own family decided, for reasons not clear to me, to neglect to vaccinate me until I started daycare at age three. Being a vaccination-free kid exposed to all manner of germs, my health suffered. Within my first year at daycare, I had contracted a very severe form of chickenpox, rubella, all possible kinds of viral infections, measles, and on top of that, before I started primary school I had nearly died from Hepatitis A.

My weight was 16 kg a week before I began attending school, though I was quite tall for my age. The illness had impaired my memory drastically. It took me a year to rehabilitate from bilirubin encephalopathy, a condition caused by very high levels of bilirubin. I can still remember what I felt and how unbearable it was for me when I was lying in my bed with an off-the-charts fever facing another infectious disease.

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Perhaps, my mom and dad were happy that they “did not poison” their child with "synthetic foreign trash", which is what they called vaccines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'd rather not talk about my opinion of my parents. Apparently, in our electronic age, children are still not guaranteed the right to basic medical care. Perhaps my vaccination-free childhood was the reason I became a pediatrician.

The History Of Vaccinations

In 429 BC, Greek historian Thucydides noticed that the lucky ones who survived the smallpox plague (a rash followed by an exhausting fever that makes the skin, especially of the face, disfigured and is frequently fatal) after the epidemics in Athens did not contract this ailment again. The Aesculapius of the fifth century BC did not have the means and conditions to investigate further, but they did wonder: why?

Only in 900 AD did the world come to a primitive method of immunization, variolation; the Chinese were the first ones who administered that method against smallpox using discharge from the scabs and putting them either under the skin or inserting dried out and powdered scabs into the noses of healthy people.

Notwithstanding the fact that it sometimes caused mild forms of the disease or even death, variolation was highly appreciated within all nations as smallpox was a very contagious viral infection that mowed down an awful lot of people yearly regardless their income, nationality or religious affiliations.

By the end of the 18th century, British physician Edward Jenner had offered the world a great gift: modern vaccination. 

Surprisingly, within another half a century an army of ardent opponents of this innovation had grown up as people who did not believe in vaccination when the procedure became mandatory, considering this tool a restriction of individual liberties. Unfortunately, the echoes of that movement still sound.

Nowadays, perhaps this group of the population is even bigger than ever before, but the inner history of their emergence is different. In the past, individuals craved freedom in all its manifestations as they were suppressed by power, religious beliefs, the size of income and so forth. The modern world does not face such severe limitations from the authorities and other issues as all kind of restrictions are well-displayed in the media and get overwhelming resonance in the public. Sensation-seeking media very often trample on the moral and ethical sides of the matter, bringing up this topic every time when the sales of their printed issues decline dramatically, discussing sporadic cases of post-vaccination complications, and deliberately hushing up the real background of the problem.

Science has done a perfect job since the 19th century; in response to violent opposition, in 1880 Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine against rabies.

Ten years later Emil von Behring was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his discovery of the basis of the diphtheria and tetanus vaccine. The former one killed thousands of people in the Europe of those days. Even the constables of those days in London were taught how to perform a tracheotomy (a small notched section on the front surface of trachea, which helps a person to breathe when the natural airway is obstructed), as the number of deadly diphtheria cases was overwhelming and infected ones were simply collapsing in the street breathless.

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The 20th century was marked by the widespread availability of vaccination against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough and tuberculosis (TB) that crucially improved the situation worldwide. Despite the fact that these vaccines were not as perfect as nowadays, they were efficient.

The next breakthrough was when the polio vaccine was created (1955), thus after several decades this ailment was nearly eliminated from our planet.

Another advance in the immunization was the complete eradication of smallpox (1980).

The new millennium has brought a great success in the immunological field. In 2008 another scientist, professor Harald zur Hausen was awarded the Nobel Prize for the vaccine against cervical cancer, which is caused in most cases by the Human papilloma virus (HPV). The country that pioneered this type of immunization was England where 12-13 years old girls were first vaccinated with HPV shots.

Then, 2013 became a year of the emergence of vaccines against shingles, rotavirus and children's flu. The culmination of the new epoch of immunology was the Meningitis B vaccine, sufficiently implemented among little babies; this fulminant infectious disease possesses fatal properties and can take the life of a little one in a couple of hours. Fortunately for us, this is preventable nowadays.