A “vaccine” is an antigen artificially administered to the body to develop immunity against infectious diseases.
The principle of vaccines first appeared in the historical record of the Peloponnesian War by the Greek historian Thucydides in 430 BC. The record noted that only those who had recovered from an infectious disease could nurse others suffering from the same disease.
The first vaccine developed was for smallpox.
Smallpox was a contagious disease characterized by fever, blisters, and pustules on the skin, with a mortality rate of over 30%. Before the 18th century, smallpox killed 400,000 people annually in Europe, and the cumulative death toll from smallpox is estimated to be around one billion.
Edward Jenner, a British physician, heard that people who milked cows and contracted cowpox did not get smallpox afterward. He applied pus from a woman infected with cowpox to an incision on an 8-year-old boy. The boy developed mild cowpox symptoms and then recovered. When Jenner later introduced the smallpox virus to the boy, he did not develop the disease. Thus, in 1796, the cowpox virus was used to develop a method to prevent smallpox, and the term “vaccine” was derived from the Latin word for cow, “vacca.”
It was the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur who isolated and cultured pathogens to create artificial vaccines. In 1873, Pasteur instructed his assistant to mass-culture chicken cholera bacteria, but the assistant left the culture at room temperature while on vacation. When Pasteur returned, the bacteria had weakened. Injecting this weakened culture into healthy chickens made them immune to cholera. This discovery led to the use of killed bacteria in vaccines for diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis, and whooping cough. Pasteur publicly demonstrated the effectiveness of vaccines during the anthrax outbreak in 1881 and successfully developed a rabies vaccine in 1885.
In the early 1940s, a terrifying infectious disease spread among children in the United States. This disease, “poliomyelitis,” caused muscle weakness and paralysis, starting from the limbs and often leading to total paralysis and death. In 1952 alone, 58,000 cases of polio were reported in the U.S., with 3,000 deaths.
Dr. Jonas Salk began researching polio in 1948. Despite the public’s reluctance towards human experimentation due to atrocities committed during World War II, Dr. Salk conducted clinical trials on himself and his family. People learned about Salk’s research and volunteered for the trials. With the participation of 220,000 volunteers and 1.8 million children, Salk successfully developed the polio vaccine in 1952.
As a result, polio was officially eradicated in 1979.
Additionally, the COVID-19 vaccine was developed exceptionally quickly.
According to the Food and Drug Administration, the development of new drugs, including clinical trials, review, and approval, typically takes a minimum of 14 years and 6 months. However, Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine took less than 11 months, with development starting on January 13, 2020, and authorization granted on December 19, 2020. Similarly, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine started development on January 13, 2020, and was authorized on December 2, 2020.