Vaccine Roll Outs: Tragedy and Triumph
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2020
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Paul Offit is on the US Food and Drug Administration's advisory panel on vaccines. He talked Dan through the history of massive public vaccination programmes in the US, starting with the unprecedented campaign against Polio in 1955. During that vaccination 200,000 children were a form of the vaccine in which the live polio virus had not been sufficiently inactivated and 40,000 of them got polio leading to 10 deaths and 200 cases of paralysis. That 'Cutter Incident' led to the birth of a modern vaccine regulatory framework and far safer vaccines, although, as he points out, vaccines can only be pronounced truly safe when they have been put into enough humans for enough time. This was a fascinating discussion about a topic that could not be more central to the our conversation at present. And yes, Paul will be taking the vaccine.....
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody, welcome to Dance Notes history at Things Are Getting Exciting. |
| 0:03.0 | I'm talking to you on Monday the 20th of November 2020. |
| 0:06.0 | We've just had the preliminary results announced from AstraZeneca and Oxford Universities vaccine for COVID-19. |
| 0:12.7 | They look fairly optimistic, thus joining two other companies who have announced results. |
| 0:18.1 | We are expecting vaccines to be delivered into the arms of people before the end of December 2020. |
| 0:24.8 | That's a record, folks. It's a record. |
| 0:26.9 | From identifying a virus to having a vaccine to deal with it in less than 11 months. |
| 0:34.4 | I was joined on this podcast by an absolute card carrying legend. |
| 0:40.8 | Paul Offit, he's an American pediatrician, he specialises in infectious diseases, vaccines, |
| 0:46.8 | immunology, virology, got all that. He's the co-inventor of the vaccine. I mean that's big time. |
| 0:52.4 | The co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine. He's a professor at the Peralman School of Medicine at the |
| 0:57.7 | University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Center for Disease Controls, the CDC's advisory |
| 1:03.8 | committee on immunization practices. He's a total dude and he's also a wonderful scholar of the |
| 1:11.3 | history of vaccination programs in the US and around the world. I want to talk to him about the |
| 1:16.8 | huge campaign to immunize kids against polio, the tragedy and the triumph of that campaign that |
| 1:23.5 | saw unsafe vaccines given to hundreds of thousands of kids whilst millions more were successfully |
| 1:30.2 | vaccinated. It feels like an important time to be talking about the history of vaccine |
| 1:34.2 | development, safety, rollout, everybody. Here we go. Enjoy. If you want to go and watch as many |
| 1:40.0 | history shows as you can possibly stomach, go to history hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. |
| 1:44.6 | A new digital history channel we got going on. It's all kicking off over there at the moment. |
| 1:48.9 | It'd be great to have you subscribe. You used the code pod1pod1. You get a month for free. |
| 1:52.9 | You're second month. There's one pound euro or dollar. It not killate yourself against boredom |
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