Vaccines

1567 – ongoing49 items

medicinescience
“Dr Jenner performing his first vaccination, on James Phipps, a boy of 8. May 14 1796.” Oil painting by Ernest Board, about 1910. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Wellcome Collection).
“Dr Jenner performing his first vaccination, on James Phipps, a boy of 8. May 14 1796.” Oil painting by Ernest Board, about 1910. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Wellcome Collection).

From variolation to mRNA

How people learned to give themselves a disease on purpose so as not to catch it later. It starts with smallpox scabs blown into the nose in Ming China and pus scratched into the skin in Istanbul, Bengal and West Africa, runs through Jenner’s cowpox and Pasteur’s laboratory, and reaches the eradication of smallpox in 1980 and the first mRNA vaccines in 2020.

How it is built

Bands frame the long efforts: variolation in Britain, the Balmis expedition that carried cowpox around the world in a chain of children, BCG’s thirteen years at Lille, the polio field trial, WHO’s Intensified Smallpox Eradication Programme, the polio eradication initiative and the eleven months from the COVID-19 genome to the first jab. The map runs from Ningguo and Adrianople to Berkeley, Bombay, Merca, Bhola Island, Brisbane and Coventry.

Dates are Gregorian, except in Britain and its colonies before September 1752: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letter, the London and Boston inoculations of 1721 and the Newgate experiment are entered in the Julian calendar (Old Style), as the sources date them. Death tolls name their source and give the range the sources give.

Threads to follow

  • smallpox: from variolation to the last case

  • polio: from the iron-lung years to the last wild cases

  • eradication: the campaigns to end a disease for good

  • biotechnology: engineered vaccines, from yeast to mRNA

  • controversy and regulation: doubts, disasters and the rules they produced

It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice. — Edward Jenner, The Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation, 1801

Items

  1. Variolation spreads from Ningguo, China

    ≈ 5 years · Ningguo prefecture, Anhui

  2. ≈ 141 years

  3. Timoni describes inoculation at Constantinople

  4. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes home about “engrafting”

    Adrianople (Edirne)

  5. Variolation in Britain

    ≈ 119 years

  6. Montagu has her daughter inoculated in London

    London

  7. Boylston inoculates his son in Boston

    Boston, Massachusetts

  8. The Newgate experiment

    Newgate Prison, London

  9. Holwell describes inoculation in Bengal

  10. Benjamin Jesty uses cowpox

    Yetminster, Dorset

  11. Jenner vaccinates James Phipps

    The Chantry, Berkeley, Gloucestershire

  12. Jenner publishes his Inquiry

  13. The Balmis expedition

    ≈ 2 years, 8 months · Route of the Balmis expedition

  14. ≈ 40 years, 9 months

  15. Pasteur’s anthrax trial at Pouilly-le-Fort

    28 days · Pouilly-le-Fort, near Melun

  16. Leicester marches against compulsory vaccination

    Leicester

  17. Joseph Meister receives the rabies vaccine

    Pasteur’s laboratory, École normale supérieure, Paris

  18. Haffkine tests his plague vaccine on himself

    Grant Medical College, Bombay

  19. BCG takes shape at Lille

    ≈ 13 years · Institut Pasteur de Lille

  20. The first BCG vaccination

    Hôpital de la Charité, Paris

  21. Theiler’s 17D yellow fever vaccine

    Rockefeller Institute, New York

  22. Poliovirus grown in the laboratory

  23. The Salk vaccine field trial

    11 months, 21 days

  24. The Salk vaccine is declared safe and effective

    Rackham Auditorium, University of Michigan

  25. The Cutter incident

    Cutter Laboratories, Berkeley, California

  26. The Soviet Union proposes eradicating smallpox

    Minneapolis

  27. Sabin’s oral vaccine is tested in the Soviet Union

    Moscow

  28. Hilleman swabs his daughter’s mumps

  29. The first measles vaccine is licensed

  30. The Intensified Smallpox Eradication Programme

    ≈ 13 years

  31. The last case of variola major

    Bhola Island, Bangladesh

  32. Ali Maow Maalin, the last natural case

    Merca (Marka), Somalia

  33. The last smallpox death

    University of Birmingham Medical School

  34. The Global Commission certifies eradication

    World Health Organization, Geneva

  35. The World Health Assembly declares smallpox eradicated

    Palais des Nations, Geneva

  36. The first genetically engineered vaccine

  37. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative

  38. Virus-like particles for an HPV vaccine

    University of Queensland, Brisbane

  39. Gavi is launched at Davos

    Davos

  40. Karikó and Weissman make mRNA quiet

    University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

  41. The Lancet retracts the Wakefield paper

  42. India’s last case of wild polio

    Howrah district, West Bengal

  43. Rinderpest is declared eradicated

    FAO headquarters, Rome

  44. Ring vaccination against Ebola in Guinea

    Basse-Guinée, Guinea

  45. From genome to first jab

    ≈ 11 months

  46. BioNTech starts Project Lightspeed

    BioNTech, Mainz

  47. The first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine trial dose

    Kaiser Permanente research institute, Seattle

  48. Africa is certified free of wild polio

  49. Pfizer and BioNTech report their trial result

  50. The UK authorises the first mRNA vaccine

  51. Margaret Keenan receives the first jab

    University Hospital, Coventry