Community immunity should be the aim
I’ve recently read a fascinating little book called Vaccines and Vesicles: a History of Smallpox Vaccination in New Zealand.
It’s written by historian Claire Le Couteur.
Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by two variants of the variola virus, Variola major and Variola minor. I say was because smallpox no longer exists in the wild. The virus was declared eradicated in 1980 after a global vaccination effort.
Smallpox was a devastating disease. It killed roughly three out of every 10 people infected and left many survivors with terrible scars. Some were left blind. The infection started with a fever followed by a rash of small red spots.
These spots would turn into large pimples, first filling with a clear fluid, which turned into a sort of pus. They’d then burst and form crusty scabs as they dried off. Along with the spots came fever, aches, and stomach upsets. It’s thought the virus killed humans by attacking their immune systems.
The word vaccination comes from the Latin word for cow, vacca, and was coined by biologist and doctor Edward Jenner.
For years, Jenner had heard how dairymaids who caught a disease known as cowpox seemed to be naturally protected from smallpox. Jenner is credited with doing the experiment that proved this to be true. In 1796, he found a young dairymaid, Sarah Nelms, who had fresh cowpox lesions on her hands and arms.
He used fluid from those lesions to inoculate an 8-year-old boy, James Phipps, who survived the experiment with not much more than a mild fever. Two months later, Jenner inoculated Phipps again, this time with the fluid from a fresh smallpox lesion.
The boy didn’t get smallpox, leading Jenner to conclude that vaccination worked.
More than 200 years later, vaccines have saved countless lives. And not just from smallpox but measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chickenpox. We know vaccines do an excellent job of protecting the individual from the disease they got the vaccine for.
But vaccines do much more. There will always be members of our community who aren’t able to be vaccinated, like newborn babies who are too young, or people with underlying medical conditions that make vaccination unsafe for them.
The beauty of vaccination is that the more people who opt in, the fewer people there are who could get the disease. That then protects those members of our community who are too vulnerable to be vaccinated themselves. They may be your family. They may be your neighbours.
You’ll often hear this benefit of vaccination referred to as ‘‘herd immunity’’. I think that’s an awful term. Community immunity, that’s what it is.
The world is still be waiting for a Covid-19 vaccine, but that doesn’t mean we can’t protect our community from the infectious diseases we haven’t eliminated.
If you or your family members have missed out on any of the routine vaccinations, it’s never too late to get vaccinated.
You’re not just doing it for you, you’re doing it for all of us. For community immunity.
The more people who opt in, the fewer people there are who could get the disease.