Summary: The First Vaccination

Vaccinations were first seen on May 14, 1796 by a man named Edward Jenner. Edward first had the hypothesis that a dose of an infection could defend a person from the infection itself. He tested his hypothesis on an eight year old boy named James Phipps with the cowpox infection. Cowpox at the time and is a mild infection that is spread from, as you can probably guess, cow to human. Young James became sick for a few days, but made a complete recovery soon after the injection. Jenner then again inoculated the boy with an infection taken from a smallpox sore, an infection found in the same family as cow pox, and James remained healthy. This is when Edward proved his hypothesis that the infection matter transmitted throughout the boy’s (immune)

He soon after this put his efforts into promoting the new idea of vaccinating. Waterhouse went about doing this by contacting the U.S. President of the time, John Adams, who he was friends with previously. Adams, however, was too busy to promote such new knowledge and so Waterhouse reached out to the Vice President as well, Thomas Jefferson, who he received a better response from. Many other men in the 1800s began to promote vaccinations over previous options like variolation because they found there was a higher success rate. (History of Vaccines,

Individually, many states have laws mandating that the people of the state received certain vaccinations. For example, these vaccinations would include what a newborn is exposed to, or immunizations required to attend school. Here there is a collision with individuals on public health and individual liberties. Because they do not receive the choice to choose to immunize their children or themselves there is tension here. Instead, the government and public health regulations try to protect the entirety of the population over individual preferences. The first time this fear had arisen was over a hundred years ago in ‘Jacobsen v. Massachusetts. In this case in Cambridge, Massachusetts negated to be vaccinated for smallpox, because he found that the law violated his individual right to care and make decisions for his own body. This challenge was eventually rejected, but was only the first of many in 1905. This was a new socially created fear and pattern that continues to die down and come back up in America’s timeline of events. (History of Vaccines,