For or against the vaccine?

Before vaccines were made, the world was a dangerous place to live. Millions of people have died each year from preventable diseases today. The Chinese were the first to discover an early form of vaccination in the 10th century: "smallpox" was the exposure of healthy people to wounds and scabies caused by disease to build immunity. Smallpox is a highly contagious disease that kills 30 percent of those infected. survivors, often left scars on the body or went blind. In 1796, Dr. Jenner performed an experiment on eight-year-old James Phipps. He injected pus into the boy's blood, and his body soon developed symptoms. When Phipps recovered, Jenner injected the smallpox virus into him, but the boy remained healthy because he built up immunity. When the results were published in 1798, the word vaccine was coined from the Latin word vaca, which means cow.

In the era before vaccines, surviving childhood was a real feat! At that time, in almost all parts of the world, there were frequent epidemics of numerous infectious diseases. Babies could come into contact with the pathogens several times a month, and their immature immune system was not able to fight these diseases. The experience of losing a baby for the mothers of that time was a common occurrence, they lived in the hope that at least one of the many children born would survive the first years of life. Many diseases from this period are almost unknown to modern societies, and their consequences and the scale they had today we can not even imagine. Typhus and cholera are almost eliminated today, primarily due to the availability of clean, sanitary water, scarlet fever is prevented by modern antibiotic therapy. Many other infectious diseases that used to die en masse have been successfully controlled and kept under control by the use of vaccines. Unfortunately, in some parts of the world, where vaccines are not available, these diseases are still a part of everyday life, and children still die from them.

Vaccines are suspicious from the moment they are made. In the past, people were skeptical for religious reasons because they thought vaccination was unclean. Across Britain in 1800, so-called anti-vaccination groups began to operate, seeking alternative measures to fight disease, such as isolation. The first group against vaccination was introduced in the United States after the visit of the British activist against vaccination William Thebes in 1870. One of the key figures in the anti-vaccination movement lately is Andrew Wakefield. In 1998, he published a report that falsely linked autism and intestinal disease to the MMR vaccine. The MMR vaccine is a trivalent vaccine given to young children to fight smallpox, mumps and rubella. Although his work has been discredited and Wefield no longer has a license to practice medicine, there has been a drop in the number of vaccinated children in the UK, due to his claims. In 2004 alone, 100,000 fewer children received the MMR vaccine in the UK, leading to an increase in the number of cases.

When a large part of the population is vaccinated, it helps prevent the spread of the disease, which in turn provides protection to those who do not have immunity or who cannot be vaccinated for some reason. This is called collective immunity and when it is compromised, there is a risk to the general population. The percentage of people who need to be vaccinated to maintain collective immunity varies from disease to disease. The Covid pandemic has been raging around the world for a year now. The vaccine was finally found. Again we have conflicts of opinion. Do you get the vaccine or not? The latest data from Pfizer and Biontek suggest that the vaccine is effective in 95 percent of cases, based on 170 cases of Kovid-19 development in volunteers. The rest of the cases were in the placebo group that received a fake injection. Although full test data has yet to be released, companies say there have been no serious security issues. But they noticed headaches and fatigue in about 2 percent of the volunteers who were given the vaccine.