Vaccine Hesitancy Isn’t New
A long look at our war on viruses
The very first “vaccine” was given to an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, who had somehow managed to avoid getting smallpox as it ran rampant through English cities and the countryside. Edward Jenner, the doctor, lived in a large estate next door and had convinced the Phippses to let him try a new method of keeping the disease at bay for their son. Exactly how he did this is not entirely known, but what is known is that smallpox was especially deadly in children.
That was May of 1796. The first clinical trials would be performed three years later, in the Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital located in St. Pancras. By then, they had 600 people to try it out on — but between the Phipps lad and 1799, Jenner himself had almost no luck at all getting test subjects.
You see, the vaccine had been made by using the less deadly cowpox, which caused a slight rash on the hands. Once injected with cowpox (in Latin, variola vaccinia, after vacca for cow), the body developed immunity to cowpox and smallpox, which protected people from the devastating and disfiguring effects of the disease. Given that it could cover your body in painful, scabby, swollen sores and leave your entire skin surface pocked and scarred, almost as if from burns, you would suppose everyone would get in line to try it. Except they…
