how vaccination happened at the end of the 18th century

As the coronavirus epidemic continues to spread, great hope has arisen around the world with announcements by Pfizer (along with BioNTech) and Moderna laboratories of two vaccines that are over 90% effective. But vaccination, widely used today, is not only a recently developed scientific method. Virology doctor Tania Louis recounted its origin, which dates back to the 18th century, on Tuesday in the Sans rendez-vous on Europe 1 program.

Variolation: injecting … pus from sick people to healthy people

We must first go back to the 18th century, when smallpox was rampant across Europe. “At the beginning of the 18th century, smallpox was much worse than the coronavirus. It affected many people and killed two-thirds, while the survivors often had lesions on their faces. It was a plague of that time,” recalls Tania Louis, when smallpox was declared defeated by the WHO in 1980.

“Everything went well to reduce its impact. A British writer, Mary Wortley Montagu, brought back to Europe an unpleasant technique that existed in Turkey which involved using pus from sick people to vaccinate it in healthy people.” This technique, as surprising as it may seem, quickly achieved results. “That way, there were far fewer deaths, fewer people died from this voluntary inoculation than from the disease if they got it later. But it was risky,” says Tania Louis. We are not yet talking about vaccination but then about ‘variolation’.

Cows, at the center of the discovery of vaccination

A few decades later, in 1790, the English scientist Edward Jenner made a discovery that made him the “father” of vaccination. “He realized that people who worked with cows never caught smallpox because they had another disease, harmless to humans, called ‘vaccine’,” continues Tania Louis.

Edward Jenner came up with the idea of ​​using this cow virus purposely inoculating it into humans to prevent them from contracting smallpox. This is how we went from smallpox to vaccination. The word “vaccine” actually comes from a cow virus. “Then, gradually, vaccination became a recognized scientific method, before spreading around the world.