>>GEORGE WASHINGTON: The General has nothing more at heart than the health of the troops…
>>NARRATOR: In the early years of the American Revolution, the Continental Army had more to fight than
enemy soldiers. Smallpox was raging through the colonies—in some places killing up to
half of the white settlers who fell sick, and taking an even deadlier toll on Native
Americans, some of whom had been deliberately infected as a weapon of occupation.
The British redcoats weren’t too bothered--the majority had already survived the disease
as children—but American-born soldiers were at great risk.
George Washington, who’d had smallpox himself as a teenager, knew that many people were
reluctant to be inoculated, or protected by receiving a less-deadly form of the virus.
But facing devastating losses, Washington wrote to Congress that he had determined to
inoculate all the troops and new recruits. This decision undoubtedly saved lives and
was probably a big part of why they won the war.
Vaccines are one of humanity’s greatest triumphs, and their development arose from
knowledge across the globe. People have been using antiviral technology for centuries.
The type of inoculation they used in the Revolutionary War—rubbing infected pus onto a healthy
person to give them a milder case—originated hundreds of years ago in Asia and Africa.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought it from Turkey to Europe. An enslaved Black man named
Onesimus introduced it from West Africa to North America.
In the late 18th century, Edward Jenner discovered that patients exposed to cowpox were then
protected from smallpox. He called the procedure “vaccination,” after the Latin word for
cow.
By 1900, we had vaccines against cholera, rabies, typhoid, and plague.
And over the next hundred years, things really started to snowball. Vaccines offer incredible
protection against formerly deadly diseases and vaccination now saves more lives than
any other medical procedure.
But, how do vaccines work? Let’s look at what they’re trying to do in the first place.
Our natural immune system is pretty incredible. Think of it like a chef with lots of recipes.
It can cook up resistance to a whole slew of diseases. Vaccines, then, are like cookbooks--instructions
that teach our chefs great new recipes.
Most vaccines use either a weakened or dead form of a virus, or a harmless piece of its
shell, to excite our immune system.
They deliver the “ingredients” for immunity to our bodies, and using those ingredients,
our immune systems whip up a recipe to protect us from a virus.
So, if we ever meet that virus down the road, our immune system remembers how to get rid
of it.
For decades, researchers have been working on another type of vaccine—a messenger RNA,
or mRNA, vaccine.
mRNA is already inside all of us. Its job is to relay instructions for making proteins--molecules
that do all kinds of work in our bodies, like keeping our cells together, helping our muscles
move, and protecting us from viruses.
An mRNA vaccine delivers really specific and efficient instructions to our immune cells.
In the case of COVID-19, the mRNA tells our bodies how to make a spike protein from the
shell of SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. Our immune cells cook up the recipe and, voila,
produce a harmless, but recognizable spike.
So, our immune system learns how to spot and destroy SARS-CoV-2 without ever being exposed
to the actual virus.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were able to develop mRNA vaccines so quickly because
researchers have been working on the science behind them for more than 30 years.
But a safe and successful vaccine takes more than scientists. For a vaccine to be recognized
as safe and efficient, it has to go through numerous tests. The three final phases are
testing in volunteers--folks from all kinds of backgrounds. Each involves more people
at every level and all new vaccines go through these trials--including the COVID-19 vaccines.
Scientists and medical professionals and volunteers from all over the world made this happen faster
than ever before.
But even as vaccination numbers climb in the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s more work to
be done. People must have access to vaccines and the education to move from hesitance to
confidence. It’s within our power to end this pandemic, and vaccines will get us there.