Dr Karl: Vaccines
MANY THINGS have surprised me during the past year, as COVID swept around the world. One was how quickly vaccines were developed to protect against the disease. Another was “vaccine hesitancy”, which describes how not everybody shared my desire to be vaccinated as soon as possible.
We humans do have an excellent and complex immune system that can fight off most diseases.
The problem is that it needs time to respond at full force. It usually takes your body a few weeks to manufacture brand-new chemicals and cells in response to a new infection – and in that short time, you could be dead.
Vaccines are designed to give your immune system a head start. They provide a tiny taste of the bad-guy germ to trigger your immune system into making protective chemicals and cells, without you having to catch the disease first.
Vaccines are not a new invention. The first European one against a contagious disease was the smallpox vaccine, in 1796. But Chinese medical texts from the late 800s describe an early form of vaccination called ‘variolation’. Smallpox caused small, visible, raised scabs to appear on those infected. The doctors of the day scraped off the top layers of the scabs and dried them. Variolation involved blowing these dried particles, which contained the smallpox virus, up the nostrils. It exposed patients to very low doses of smallpox virus particles.
Back then in China, medical quality control was not particularly good. If you were lucky, you would get a lot of dead skin and a tiny amount of smallpox virus. But if you were unlucky, you could get lots of smallpox virus.
The death rate from variolation was about 1 per cent. But that was better odds than the 35 per cent death rate from contracting smallpox naturally. The 99 per cent who survived variolation had a far milder illness than if they’d been infected naturally. But the big upside was that they were then immune to the disease for life.
So for anybody who thinks ancient Chinese medicine is the best option to fight COVID, vaccination will 100 per cent fit the bill.