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By Michelle V.
Vaccines have been a medical innovation that we all have heard of in today’s society. From infants to the elderly, most people in our century receive vaccinations regularly to help preserve their health. While many dread receiving vaccines due to the deep insertion of a thin needle in the muscles, the benefits of vaccines can be proved through the statistics and disease rates after vaccination became normalized.
In 1796, according to immunize.org, the first vaccination was done in human history to help prevent the spread of smallpox. Smallpox was a devastating disease that ended the lives of millions of people in the 18th century and affected countless survivors long after recovery. During this time, Edward Jenner, an English physician, conducted an observational study, looking into how milkmaids who contracted cowpox, a milder form of smallpox from cows, showcased immunity to smallpox. Before Jenner, many had tested the idea of vaccination, or willful injection of disease or a specific pathogen to induce immunity, an old practice that colonizers picked up from the Middle East and Asia, mainly Turkey (A Brief History of Vaccination). Using this information and his new observations, Edward Jenner inoculated a small, 8-year-old boy named James Phipps with the inner cells and material of a cowpox sore on the hand of a milkmaid, inducing an immune response in Phipps’ body, according to the World Health Organization. After being sick with cowpox for a while but recovered rapidly. To test his theory, Jenner then exposed the newly recovered Phipps to smallpox, and the young boy did not contract the smallpox disease, confirming that the inoculation successfully transferred immunity. This procedure was then named varioloation and helped develop the vaccination technology.
Since Edward Jenner and his successful vaccination of smallpox, vaccine technology was then expanded to help prevent rampaging diseases like polio and rabies in the 20th century. There are now various methods of developing vaccines, each with its own mechanism. These are the live-attenuated vaccine, killed vaccines, subunit vaccine, toxoid vaccine, mRNA vaccine, and viral vector vaccine, as defined in the article Vaccine Types by the US Department of Health and Human Services! The live-attenuated vaccine uses a living disease pathogen that has been weakened, causing a limited immune response and inducing immunity in the body. The current measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are examples of live-attenuated vaccines that are given throughout the world to children, pushing a naturally acquired immunity in the body. Much like the attenuated or weakened vaccine, the killed or inactivated vaccine uses a dead pathogen or disease agent to help the immune system recognize that specific pathogen and launch an attack accordingly in the future. The killed pathogen will still be covered in proteins used for the identification of an organism known as antigens. These killed pathogens will not harm the body but will allow the immune system to identify the foreign organism as a threat due to its specific antigens, allowing the body to create antibodies to attack the pathogen. The killed vaccine was especially used in the 1950s to protect the vaccinated individual from polio and is also used in the Hepatitis A vaccine. The subunit vaccine, used to fight against HPV (human papillomavirus) and Hepatitis B, uses a specific part of a pathogen rather than the whole organism. This might be simply the surface antigens or a protein of the disease agent, stimulating an immune response. Toxoid vaccines use a toxin produced by a specific pathogen to train the body’s immune response rather than the entire pathogen itself. This type of vaccine tends to be used in cases where the toxin produced by a disease agent is what causes harm to the body, such as tetanus and diphtheria (Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy (OIDP)). The mRNA and viral vector approaches to vaccine development have skyrocketed in recent years with the Corona Virus Pandemic, as they were used for three of the most common COVID-19 vaccines delivered in America (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson). The mRNA vaccine, used in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines, inputs messenger RNA into the bodily cells, which produce a protein associated with COVID-19, stimulating an immune response in the body (“Different Types of COVID-19 Vaccines: How They Work”). The Johnson & Johnson vaccine used viral vector technology, which inputted coronavirus material in a separate carrier virus, or “viral vector” that was then injected into the body to create a similar immune response according to Mayoclinic.
With all the different mechanisms and technologies available for vaccine development in today’s world, each and every tested and developed vaccine shows high success rates with few casualties. Despite the side effects of vaccines, they have been proven to serve their purpose and prevent future infection by training the immune system to identify and react to pathogens. No matter what type of vaccine one opts for, being vaccinated helps ensure that every individual and their loved ones stay safe and protected from diseases.
Work Cited
A Brief History of Vaccination. www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/a-brief-history-of-vaccination#:~:text=Dr%20Edward%20Jenner%20created%20the,cowpox%20were%20immune%20to%20smallpox.&text=In%20May%201796%2C%20English%20physician,the%20hand%20of%20a%20milkmaid.
“Different Types of COVID-19 Vaccines: How They Work.” Mayo Clinic, 4 Nov. 2023, www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/different-types-of-covid-19-vaccines/art-20506465.
Immunize.org. “Vaccine History Timeline | Immunize.org.” Immunize.org, 5 July 2024, www.immunize.org/vaccines/vaccine-timeline/#:~:text=Not%20long%20ago%20we%20celebrated,%2C%20molecular%20biology%2C%20and%20vaccinology.
Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy (OIDP). “Vaccine Types.” HHS.gov, 22 Dec. 2022, www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html.
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