The major problem in Britain and elsewhere was complacency. The early success in suppressing smallpox, and indeed eliminating it in some places, led parents to neglect vaccination.
When Bostonians in 1721 faced a deadly smallpox outbreak, a new procedure called inoculation was found to help fend off the disease. Not everyone was won over, and newspapers fed the controversy.
Australia has a long history of incarceration of migrants, Indigenous people and those considered ‘enemies’ of the state. This has formed a ‘template’ for modern-day quarantine and detention policies.
We’ve gone from a novel virus to several COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year. Here’s what we’ve learned from earlier vaccines to allow this to happen.
A 1904 revolt against mandatory smallpox inoculation taught Brazilian health officials a deadly lesson on how to vaccinate a skeptical public. Today President Bolsonaro seems to ignore that history.
As ready as you are to be done with COVID-19, it’s not going anywhere soon. A historian of disease describes how once a pathogen emerges, it’s usually here to stay.
The history of anti-vaccination theories can help us understand how such claims capture a popular following. The same misinformation used against 19th century smallpox vaccine is still in use today.
Societies and cultures that seem ossified and entrenched can be completely upended by pandemics, which create openings for conquest, innovation and social change.
For a COVID-19 vaccine to stop the pandemic, a large percentage of the population will have to get vaccinated. A law professor explains how far government and employer vaccine mandates can legally go.
The success of the smallpox vaccine was far from guaranteed when Edward Jenner first published his treatise in late 18th century. A curator of the book talks about what we can learn from it today.
The smallpox virus appears to have been with humanity for millennia before a global vaccination drive wiped it out. Current genome research suggests how smallpox spread and where it came from.
The smallpox vaccination used calf lymph, which was unacceptable to vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists who were growing in number from the mid 19th century.
Over 200 years ago, a French Jesuit missionary wrote an essay criticising China’s handling of smallpox. The reality, though, was China was light years ahead of the world in confronting the disease.
Director of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit in Emerging and Zoonotic Infections, and Professor of Neurology, University of Liverpool