THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR
SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that have won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.
VACCINATION is on everybody’s mind now. Its history is just fascinating. The word is derived from Latin vacca meaning a cow and here’s why.
Most accounts attribute its discovery to the Gloucestershire physician Edward Jenner in 1796. Smallpox epidemics ravaged the country at that time destroying whole communities – young and old; rich and poor, urban and rural.
He noted that milkmaids who had been previously infected with the almost harmless cowpox didn’t succumb.
It just passed them by. So why not artificially give everybody cowpox? Imagine his joy when his experiment worked. His portrait now hangs in the hallowed halls of the Royal College of Physicians in London as the founder of vaccination.
But he wasn’t really the first. Twenty years earlier, a farmer, Benjamin Jesty, in the Dorset village of Yetminster did the same thing. He got no recognition other than a plaque opposite his house.
He made exactly the same observation and saved his family by giving them all cowpox just before smallpox swept through southern England. But he had no education and could not convey his discovery.
And we now know that many farmers in rural China in the early 1500s practised exactly the same technique. Information travelled slowly then – no post, no planes and no internet. Today is so different with over a million easily accessible papers on Covid-19 published last year.
But the absolutely amazing thing is that in a short six months we have made several vaccines to Covid-19 from scratch. We don’t know yet how long immunity will last and how powerful it will be at dealing with mutant strains.
But it will surely reduce transmission and save lives of the most vulnerable. And help get our society back to normal.
Modern medical science is a massive team effort. We can only be amazed by the speed at which the technology has been rolled out.
But there will be no new portraits in the College – it’s simply no longer like that.