JENNER JITTERS
With many a conspiracy theory about the vaccine getting airtime, it transpires that this is a perfectly natural reaction. When Berkeley-born Edward Jenner developed the world’s first vaccine for smallpox, he was widely ostracised and ridiculed, with critics claiming it was repulsive and ungodly to inoculate someone with material from a diseased animal.
In Jenner’s case that animal was a cow – he’d observed that milk maids didn’t get smallpox thanks to their immunity to cow pox, and indeed the word vaccine comes from the Latin, vacca (cow). It prompted satirist James Gillray’s cartoon The Cow Pock depicting “the wonderful effects of the new inoculation”, with cows emerging from different parts of the body. It was based on alleged cases of vaccinees developing bovine features.
If only the Russian fake news merchants knew what we’d seen in 1802!
We’d have got a more imaginative smear campaign than the AstraZeneca vaccine turning us all into apes.