n 1969, a debate took place between John M. Neff, MD, and Samuel Lawrence Katz, MD, on whether to continue to immunize children against smallpox given that, at the time, the disease was under control in the country. (Think of polio today, where it is found only in areas of Central Asia, yet children in the United States and other countries continue to receive the vaccine.) The debate was televised and archived by the US National Library of Medicine.
We at The History of Vaccines love timelines. They help explain historical events in a way that is a little more entertaining than a boring list of important dates. Below is a small project started before the pandemic that I only now got around to finishing. It is the story of the Balmis Expedition, an expedition by Spanish physicians and their team to take the newly developed smallpox vaccine to the Spanish colonies in the Americas and Asia.
Questions about vaccines linger in the public and are often repeated by public figures. One question is which vaccines are the most necessary. In this post, we tell you which are not necessary and why.
In 1904, an anti-vaccine uprising almost brought down the Brazilian government. A combination of social strife and lack of confidence in the government boiled over when new vaccine requirements were about to be enforced by public health authorities with the backing of the police.
An African slave by the name of Onesimus might have been the key person in beginning the fight against smallpox in the American Colonies in the early 1700s.