Guest Post by Alex Berenson
Robert F. Kennedy’s remaking of the federal advisory panel on immunizations offers a chance to rethink the constant push for more and more expensive, less and less effective jabs.
In the beginning was the smallpox vaccine.
In the late 1700s, an English physician named Edward Jenner realized milkmaids infected with cowpox rarely fell prey to smallpox, a devastating virus. Jenner began deliberately giving people cowpox and found they too became immune to smallpox.
Over the next two centuries, humanity beat back bacterial and viral diseases. The British epidemiologist John Snow realized cholera was spread by sewage. The German scientist Robert Koch and French physician Louis Pasteur invented germ theory. The British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. The American physician D.A. Henderson finished Jenner’s work with a global effort to eradicate smallpox.
It is vital not to understate the role vaccines played in this victory over disease, suffering, and death. But it’s vital not to overstate it, too.
