Now, we have vital technology that helps us create vaccines in less than 1 year, but how were vaccines created in the 1900s? and what was the first vaccine?

The first vaccine was created to help treat smallpox, almost 10,000 years ago. In the 18th century, Europe lost half a million lives annually. The method of developing vaccines is called inoculation and involved inserting mutated versions of the virus into individuals. In the middle ages, the Chinese starting working out a cure.

They took the scabs of survivors, dried them, ground them into a powder, packed it in cotton, put it in a pipe, and blew the concoction into an uninfected individual’s nose.

This method is called insufflation and is the first documented use of a term we now call inoculation. Innoculation is a deliberate infection to help develop immunity to the virus. This method is what is used in flu vaccines to help uninfected individuals gain immunity.

They also noticed that people working with cows that had cowpox weren’t affected by smallpox. Cowpox was so similar that contracting the virus from the cow made them immune to smallpox and cowpox. Since cowpox is primarily a cow virus, people face very mild symptoms while developing their immune systems to fight off smallpox. Today cowpox still exists but it is very rare and self-healable. With 80% of the population vaccinated against Smallpox, it was eradicated in the 1970s.

In the late 1950s, the much-awaited polio vaccine came out saving millions of lives. It took American scientists Jonas Salk almost 7 years! In the 1960’s the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine came out, followed by Hepatitis B in the 1980s

With the help of modern technology, 50 years later we developed a vaccine in under a year!

With the Pfizer covid vaccine FDA approved, I urge everyone to get vaccinated!

In the present time, there are tons of vaccines out, designed to help fight diseases and prevent pandemics.

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