The Vaccine: Medicine’s Most Impressive Feat
The history of medicine, within its cavalcade of names and dates, documents the final triumph of medical science over ancient superstition and rigid doctrine. With an ever-deepening knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and the nature of disease, scientists and clinicians have leveraged the tools of pharmacology, surgery, and technology to make remarkable gains in diagnosis and treatment. A practicing physician from 1921 would be dumbfounded by MRIs, antibiotics, joint replacements, and organ transplantation, and probably hadn’t yet heard about the isolation of insulin that year by the Canadians Banting and Best.
Despite the remarkable progress made in diagnosing and managing an array of diseases, the greatest achievements in human health and well-being have not come from direct medical care. The basic public health interventions of clean air and water, safe and sufficient food, and hygienic living conditions—to the extent that they have been realized—have prevented more disease and misery than the sum total of modern medicine’s most impressive feats.
Mass immunization is perhaps the greatest achievement in human health and well-being.
Except perhaps for one: the extraordinary achievement of mass immunization against and array of crippling and deadly infectious diseases. Immunizations so safely and effectively prevent human suffering that they should themselves be seen as basic public health measures. Pediatricians like me make it a sacred duty to ensure that children under our care are fully immunized. Ironically, because we now have little or no collective memory of these diseases, we find ourselves at risk of becoming victims of our own success.
No one alive today has any direct recollection of the historic all-time killer smallpox, because it has been eradicated from our planet. Only our oldest citizens remember how childhood paralytic polio, now extremely rare globally, terrorized American families every year. Our 1921 physician regularly confronted diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, but it’s entirely possible for present-day physicians to pass an entire career without having seen a single case. If you’re wondering why preventing whooping cough is a good idea, these videos will help:
Whooping Cough in an AdultInfant Girl with Whooping CoughSo you can imagine how discouraging it is for me to hear the strident, misguided voices of “anti-vaxxers” littering social media with misinformation, and how painful it’s been to witness renewed outbreaks of measles, a vaccine-preventable disease that can maim and kill. It’s hard to understand why so many adults don’t protect themselves or their children against influenza, which claims tens of thousands of lives annually in this country.
Read this blog post by author Nancy Burkhalter about the famous French novelist George Sand.
The coronavirus pandemic has made a household word of “vaccine hesitancy,” a polite term used within the public health community to refer to delaying or refusing vaccines. Despite the ingenious development and record-time deployment of several incredibly safe and effective coronavirus vaccines, a swath of people across the globe balk at getting the shots—even as Covid-19 has already claimed over 3 million lives.
If Edward Jenner, the English physician who pioneered smallpox immunization, could drop in to check on his legacy, he would be shaking his head. “I had more than my share of “vaccine hesitancy” back in the 18th century,” he’d say, “but I expected to find you well past that here in the 21st. Your science is astonishing. Why doesn’t everybody see how lucky they are?”