Orphans Delivered The World's First Vaccine

Science Diction

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Friday, Society & Culture, Science, Origin, Culture, Words, History, Word, Language

4.8 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2021

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use last December, it felt like - at last! - our nightmare was nearly over. Then came reports of botched distribution efforts, from broken websites to factory mix-ups. Scientists created the vaccine in record time, but it was beginning to look like that might’ve been the easy part. But if you think vaccine distribution was a logistical nightmare in 2021, try doing it in the early 1800s. In 1796, Edward Jenner discovered that cowpox worked as a vaccine against smallpox. All you had to do was pop a cowpox sore on someone’s skin and transfer the lymph fluid (a.k.a. pus) into a cut on a second person. Soon, they'd develop a few sores, but when they recovered, they'd be immune to smallpox, a far more serious disease. This worked well enough for short distances, but when smallpox began to destroy Spanish colonies in the Americas, Spain had to figure out a way to move the vaccine across the ocean. Their solution was resourceful, effective, and very ethically dubious. Science writer Sam Kean brings us the story of the world's first vaccination campaign. Guest: Sam Kean is a science writer, author of The Bastard Brigade, and host of the podcast Disappearing Spoon from the Science History Institute. Footnotes & Further Reading: Listen to our episode on the origin of the word ‘vaccine.’ Listen to a full episode about this story on Sam Kean’s podcast, Disappearing Spoon. Credits: Science Diction is produced by Johanna Mayer and Elah Feder. Elah is our Editor and Senior Producer. Daniel Peterschmidt is our composer. Nadja Oertelt is our Chief Content Officer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today, science writer Sam Keen tells us about a very old, very effective, and ethically dubious vaccination program.
0:08.4	In this case, what they chose to do is use orphaned children to bring the vaccine across the ocean.
0:16.2	I'm Johanna Mayer. this is science diction.
0:33.9	Around this time last year, we put out an episode on a word that we have all said a lot over the past year.
0:35.2	Vaccine.
0:40.3	It comes from the 18th century when a doctor named Edward Jenner found out that you could protect people from smallpox by giving them cowpox, what he called in Latin
0:46.3	variole vaccini, which meant puscules of cows. Cowpox is not pleasant. You get pus-filled sores on your arms or your face.
0:58.3	But then, after you recover, you have immunity to smallpox, which was killing a ton of people at the time.
1:06.4	And Jenner had found this incredibly simple solution. All you had to do was take someone with cowpox, pop one of those postules, take out the lymph fluid, aka pustral juice, and stick it in someone else. And they were vaccinated. Easy. But having a vaccine and actually getting it to people around the world, very different
1:30.6	problems. And if you thought getting shots into arms was tough in 2021, try doing it in the 1800s.
1:38.2	Yeah, they didn't have refrigerators, dry ice, all the things that we kind of take for granted nowadays.
1:43.3	Sam Keane, science writer and host of the Disappearing Spoon podcast.
1:47.6	Here to tell us that story.
1:49.5	Within a town, it wasn't actually that hard to spread.
1:53.1	They would essentially take the fluid from a cowpox sore,
1:58.5	and they would scratch it into the arm of the next person. And nine or ten days
2:04.5	later, that person got a little puschule, took the fluid from that one, scratched it into the
2:09.7	next person's arm, and so on. So that was a fairly straightforward, if a bit laborious process.
2:16.5	The real challenge was getting it over very long distances,
2:20.1	over an ocean or something like that. So when Spain decided they needed to get this vaccine to
2:24.9	their colonies in the Americas, they had problems. First, they tried just transporting in his dried
2:31.5	pus. That had worked for shorter distances, but this trip was just
	...

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