What is Vaccination?

Main Article

In it's basic form, vaccination has been known for centuries; by some accounts, the Chinese were vaccinating against smallpox using naturally-available materials 400 years ago Sixth Tone [Shanghai] but these early techniques, while perhaps better than nothing, were not particularly safe.

More recently, the British physician Edward Jenner discovered in 1796 that the naturally occurring cowpox virus could be used to confer immunity to the related smallpox. In fact, the word "Vaccination" is derived from the Latin adjective "vaccinus", meaning "of or from the cow". This vaccine has been widely successful in ridding the world of the scourge of deadly smallpox. Wikipedia Recently, this same vaccine against smallpox has also been demonstrated to be effective against other related pox viruses, e.g. monkeypox.

Today, there are many different methods for making vaccines against a wide variety of infectious diseases. In all cases, vaccines work by presenting to our adaptive immune system a sample of something that "looks like, smells like, or tastes like" a disease-causing microbe that can "teach" our immune system to attack "similar" disease-causing microbes, so that our immune system is prepared to defend against the disease-causing microbes. There are a variety of different technologies, and there is usually a trade-off between safety and efficacy. Examples include, in historical order:

• Related species that are less pathogenic in humans (e.g. cowpox, camelpox, etc.)
• Killed pathogens (e.g. Salk polio vaccine)
• Live attenuated pathogens (e.g. Sabin polio vaccine)
• Synthetic protein that resembles part of a pathogen
• mRNA vaccines (e.g. COVID-19)

These different vaccines vary in safety and effectiveness, and medical ethics demands that informed consent be obtained from each individual before receiving any vaccine. Informed consent requires full disclosure of the known benefits and risks, as well as what information remains unknown.

Sadly, in recent times, politicians have used the force of law to override the informed consent requirements of medical ethics, despite inadequate scientific proof of benefits and risks. [Medical science normally expects that statistical evidence be presented that the strength of claimed benefits and risks meets or exceeds 95% certainty]. "Experts" who fail to present such evidence are not scientists; they are gas-lighting political hacks.