“Vacca” is the Latin word for “cow” and the root of the English word “vaccine.” Let’s review a little history so as to understand how cows had a part in the development of vaccines.
Smallpox has ravaged mankind and his civilizations periodically for centuries. The disease has been found in an Egyptian mummy dated to 1500 B.C. In the 18th century, 400,000 Europeans per year died from the disease. After the European conquest of the Americas, an estimated two-thirds of the native population was exterminated by the disease. In the 20th century, smallpox was estimated to have killed 300 million people worldwide.
Early attempts to control smallpox started in China, where it was observed that those who survived the sickness were protected from recurrences for the rest of their lives. China started the practice of inoculation, which involved collecting the pustular exudate from an infected person and placing this in a skin cut of a vulnerable person with the hope that this person would survive the resultant sickness and have lifelong protection. This practice spread to Europe and the Americas, but was not widely accepted because of a 1-in-50 death rate.
In 1796, an English physician, Edward Jenner, inoculated a young man with material taken from lesions on an infected cow. Several weeks later, he inoculated the same individual with the pus from an active smallpox patient and noted that he was completely immune. This practice produced only mild symptoms and, surprisingly, was free of associated deaths. Because of the cows, “vaccination” became a new English word.
The practice of smallpox vaccination spread agonizingly slowly for multiple reasons. In the 18th century, there was widespread mistrust of medical practitioners, and inaccurate knowledge of disease causes and transmissions made vaccination sound more like witchcraft than science. There was a distribution problem in the Americas, as cowpox was not endemic. To solve this problem, Spain recruited 22 orphaned boys in a scheme to bring the vaccine to the Americas. Just before departure, two of the boys were vaccinated with cowpox. When pustules appeared, the material was transferred to two other boys until the ship arrived in Venezuela where the last to be vaccinated still had active pustules.
Gradually, vaccination pushed smallpox out of Europe and the U.S., however, as late as the 1950s it was estimated that 60 percent of the world’s population lived in countries were the virus was endemic. The World Health Organization started a global vaccination program in 1957. The last diagnosed case occurred in 1977 and WHO declared the disease globally eradicated in 1980.
The vaccine is still available because of concerns about biological terrorism (the virus still exists in military labs in the U.S. and Russia). Also, recently it has been shown to be effective against monkeypox. It took 184 years from the time of the discovery of a vaccine to the defeat of smallpox. Expanding medical knowledge has allowed not only the development of vaccines for multiple different infectious diseases, but the even more promising development of vaccines for the prevention (cervical cancer) and cure (melanoma) of cancers.
Considering the historically demonstrated safety, benefit and future promise of vaccines, the continuing existence of vaccine deniers is hard to understand. The data clearly shows that the highest death rate from COVID occurs in the unvaccinated (deniers) population. Future studies of the difference in response to COVID in the United States and China should be very enlightening. The U.S. has gone through an early phase characterized by poorly practiced social isolation linked to high death rate subsequently abated by widely spread vaccination and followed by a relatively quick return to pre-pandemic normalcy. China, on the other hand, has had a very low early death rate linked to severe social isolation practices combined with slow and limited vaccinations. China is going through reopening now and appears to be facing very high death rates.
History will give us an answer to whether rapid universal vaccination combined with intermittent isolation practices or draconian enforced social isolation practices combined with limited vaccination is the best course of action. Unfortunately, history also shows that vaccine deniers will not learn and will continue to die in greater numbers.
William Bezdek is a retired physician and long-standing Bakersfield resident.
