50 Fun Facts About Vaccine

What kind of protection does a vaccine provide?

The immune system learns to recognise the agent as a threat and destroys the real pathogen when it turns up later.

The words 'vaccine' and 'vaccination' derive from the Latin for smallpox of which animal?

Edward Jenner coined Variolae vaccinae for cowpox in 1798, and the term was later extended to all such inoculations.

What is the science of vaccine development and production called?

Smallpox was the first disease for which a vaccine was ever produced, and the first to be eradicated by one.

For how many preventable infections does the WHO say licensed vaccines are available?

Vaccines remain elusive for others, including herpes simplex, malaria, gonorrhoea and HIV.

Who brought the folk practice of smallpox inoculation from Turkey to Britain in 1721?

She had her four-year-old daughter variolated in front of royal physicians on her return to England.

In which country was inoculation against smallpox first recorded, in the 16th century?

Practitioners blew powdered smallpox scabs up the nostrils, a method called nasal insufflation.

What was the deliberate infection with smallpox material to prevent severe disease called?

Far riskier than Jenner's cowpox method, it was banned in England in 1840.

In 1721, Charles Maitland tested smallpox inoculation on six prisoners at which London prison?

The experiment succeeded and the royal family soon promoted the procedure.

Which son of George III died in 1783 several days after being inoculated against smallpox?

He was a son of George III; the death was a blow to the practice's royal backing.

In 1796, Edward Jenner scratched cowpox pus from a milkmaid's hand into the arm of which 8-year-old boy?

Six weeks later he variolated the boy with smallpox and observed that he did not catch it.

The 1804 Balmis expedition carried smallpox vaccine to Spain's colonies using what method?

The vaccine survived only 12 days outside a body, so it was passed from person to person on the voyage to Mexico and the Philippines.

Who developed the second generation of vaccines in the 1880s, against chicken cholera and anthrax?

From then on, vaccines became a matter of national prestige and compulsory vaccination laws followed.

What is the effect whereby a highly vaccinated population makes outbreaks unlikely even for the unvaccinated?

It is why measles, mumps, rubella and polio are nowhere near as common as a century ago.

In 2015, endemic wild poliovirus remained in parts of which three countries?

Polio spreads only among humans, so eradication is possible; Nigeria was declared free of wild polio in 2020, leaving Afghanistan and Pakistan.

How many measles cases were recorded in the United States in 1958, before the vaccine?

After vaccination the number fell to fewer than 150 a year; the vaccine is estimated to prevent a million deaths worldwide annually.

Roughly what proportion of people fail to respond to a vaccine for host-related reasons like genetics?

Older people also respond less strongly, a pattern called immunosenescence.

Adaptive immunity after vaccination takes roughly how long to fully develop?

Innate immunity can switch on in as little as twelve hours, but the host can still be infected during the gap.

Which type of vaccine uses live microorganisms cultivated to lose their virulence?

Yellow fever, measles, mumps, rubella and BCG are examples; they give durable immunity but can be unsafe for the immunocompromised.

Tetanus and diphtheria vaccines are made from inactivated bacterial poisons. What are they called?

A rattlesnake-venom toxoid is even used to vaccinate dogs against bites.

The hepatitis B vaccine, made only from the virus's surface proteins, is an example of which type?

The proteins were once extracted from patients' blood serum but are now made by putting the viral gene into yeast.

Conjugate vaccines link a bacterium's outer coat to a carrier molecule. Which vaccine uses this?

The trick fools the immune system into treating the polysaccharide as if it were a protein antigen.

The BCG tuberculosis vaccine is made from which bacterium?

It is a 'Jennerian' vaccine, using a related animal pathogen the way Jenner used cowpox.

Which two scientists won Columbia's Horwitz Prize in 2021 for pioneering mRNA vaccine technology?

mRNA vaccines such as BNT162b2 were developed in 2020 with the help of Operation Warp Speed.

mRNA vaccines package the RNA inside what?

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are the best-known examples.

Which viruses have been used as carriers for viral vector vaccines?

A safe virus smuggles in the pathogen's genes so the body makes the antigen itself.

What is a vaccine designed to immunise against a single antigen or microorganism called?

Multivalent shots cover several strains or germs; prefixes such as trivalent and quadrivalent give the count.

In the trivalent Sabin polio vaccine, which serotype had to be reduced because it suppressed the others?

The doses of serotypes 1 and 3 were increased in the early 1960s to fix the interference.

What is the name for a substance added to a vaccine to boost the immune response?

The tetanus vaccine, for example, is usually adsorbed onto alum for a stronger effect.

Which vaccine was paired with anthrax vaccine before the 1990 Gulf campaign to speed immunity?

A faster response matters when exposure might be imminent.

Which mercury-containing preservative was removed from most childhood vaccines as a precaution?

A multi-dose flu shot now carries less than a microgram of mercury, about the same as ten grams of canned tuna.

A 1928 incident in which 12 of 21 children died after a diphtheria vaccine showed the need for what?

The vaccine lacked a preservative and became contaminated with Staphylococcus.

A 10-11-year study of 657,461 children found what about the MMR vaccine and autism?

No convincing scientific evidence supports the claim that vaccines cause autism.

Influenza and yellow fever vaccines may contain traces of what, because of how the viruses are grown?

Woodruff and Goodpasture showed in 1931 that viruses could be grown in embryonated chicken eggs.

In what year did cell culture replace eggs as the standard way of growing viruses for vaccines?

Eggs had been used for the yellow fever vaccine in 1935 and the influenza vaccine in 1945.

What does the lower-case 'a' stand for in the DTaP and Tdap vaccine names?

It means the pertussis component contains only part of the whooping cough organism.

Under the 2010s US schedule, up to how many injections could a child get by age two?

Combination shots such as the pentavalent and MMRV vaccines were introduced to make compliance easier.

A vaccine against which disease, caused by the chickenpox virus and mostly affecting the elderly, arrived in 2006?

Vaccine recommendations for older people otherwise concentrate on pneumonia and influenza.

Which US law created a no-fault compensation programme for people severely injured by vaccines?

At least 19 countries run such schemes; the UK's is the Vaccine Damage Payment.

Which US body monitors vaccine safety after licensing through the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System?

Manufacturers must run Phase IV studies once a vaccine is in wide public use.

Who was the most prolific vaccine developer of the twentieth century?

The century also saw the polio vaccine in the 1950s and smallpox eradicated in the 1960s and 70s.

Which country's Serum Institute is one of the largest vaccine producers by number of doses?

It improved measles vaccine output 10- to 20-fold by switching from chicken eggs to MRC-5 cell culture.

Roughly how long does the full process of developing a vaccine take?

A manufacturing plant alone costs $50 million to $300 million and takes 4 to 6 years to build.

What is the 'cold chain'?

Solid oral vaccines are more stable, reducing the need for it and cutting costs.

Vaccine-laced food scattered in the wild has been used to fight rabies in which animal?

Rabies vaccination of dogs is required by law in many places where the disease occurs.

DIVA marker vaccines were first developed against which pig illness?

J. T. van Oirschot's team in Lelystad exploited a missing gE gene; the strategy has since eradicated the virus in several countries.

In 2019 the World Health Organization named what among the top ten global health threats?

It covers outright refusal, delay and picking some vaccines but not others, and often ends in outbreaks.

In which country did the last endemic case of smallpox anywhere in the world occur, in October 1977?

The WHO eradication campaign, led by Donald Henderson, had begun a decade earlier in 1967.

What cheap two-pronged tool, developed by Benjamin Rubin in the 1960s, delivered smallpox vaccine worldwide?

It held one dose by capillarity, cost about $5 per thousand, used a quarter of the vaccine of other methods and could be flame-sterilised and reused.

HPV vaccines all protect against types 16 and 18, which cause roughly what share of cervical cancers?

The first HPV vaccine arrived in 2006; the nonavalent version adds protection against five further cancer-causing types.

Why did Jonas Salk choose not to patent his 1955 polio vaccine?

The March of Dimes foundation did explore a patent but found his techniques were not novel enough to qualify.