100 Fun Facts About Vaccine

What kind of protection does a vaccine provide?

Active acquired immunity leaves the body with a memory of the germ, so protection can last for years, while ready-made antibodies fade within months.

Which Salem-era Puritan minister learned about smallpox inoculation from Onesimus, a man he enslaved?

Cotton Mather pressed Boston's doctors to inoculate during the 1721 epidemic, and someone hurled a lit grenade into his home.

Which Founding Father lost his four-year-old son to smallpox, then regretted never having the boy inoculated?

Benjamin Franklin told the story in his autobiography for parents who avoided inoculation, fearing they could never forgive themselves if it went wrong.

In 2021, the WHO recommended the first vaccine against which disease, a leading killer of young African children?

Malaria: the RTS,S shot cut deadly severe malaria among young children, and in 2023 the WHO backed a second vaccine, R21.

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

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose face smallpox had scarred, had her own young daughter inoculated when an epidemic threatened England.

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

China: healers there blew smallpox material up children's noses, sometimes grinding dried scabs into a powder first.

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

Variolation usually caused a milder case than catching smallpox naturally, but patients could still die or spread it, so England banned it in 1840.

Charles Maitland tested smallpox inoculation on condemned prisoners at which London prison?

Newgate: the prisoners had been promised their freedom for undergoing the experiment, and every one of them survived.

During the American Revolution, which general ordered the mass smallpox inoculation of his troops?

George Washington: inoculation had been forbidden in his army in 1776, but in 1777 he reversed that and had his soldiers inoculated.

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

James Phipps: when Jenner later inoculated him with real smallpox, no disease developed, and Jenner concluded the protection was complete.

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

Arm-to-arm transfer between carriers: the live vaccine travelled through a chain of children, taken from one child's arm to infect the next.

Which scientist developed vaccines against chicken cholera and anthrax in the 1880s?

Louis Pasteur went on to give his rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister, bitten by a rabid dog, and the boy's recovery drew patients from around the world.

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

Herd immunity protects people who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons, because the germ runs out of people to pass through.

In 2014, endemic wild poliovirus remained in parts of which three countries?

Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan: Nigeria came off the endemic list in 2015, but wild cases reappeared there in 2016, delaying Africa's polio-free certification until 2020.

A 2014–15 measles outbreak in California was traced to which theme park?

Disneyland: the California cases carried a strain that had recently caused a large outbreak in the Philippines, and linked cases turned up in Mexico and Canada.

Russia named the COVID-19 vaccine it approved in August 2020 after which Soviet space first?

Sputnik: Russia approved the vaccine on early results from small trials, before large trials had tested its safety and effectiveness.

After a vaccine dose, roughly how long does the body take to build its full antibody defence?

About 2 weeks: innate defences react within hours, but antibody-making cells take one to two weeks to ramp up, which is why a flu jab can take up to 14 days to work.

Which type of vaccine is the MMR shot?

Attenuated vaccines like MMR use live but weakened viruses, giving durable immunity, but they may be unsafe for people with weakened immune systems.

Which type of vaccine are the tetanus and diphtheria shots?

Toxoid vaccines followed years of treating tetanus with antitoxin from immunised horses, which gave some patients severe allergic reactions.

The hepatitis B vaccine is an example of which type of vaccine?

Subunit vaccines like this one were first made from proteins purified from infected people's blood, then from 1986 by yeast cells given the viral gene.

Which vaccine for babies links a bacterium's sugary outer coat to a carrier protein to strengthen the immune response?

Hib vaccine: a plain sugar-coat version worked less well and was replaced from 1987 by the conjugate, after which Hib meningitis fell sharply.

The BCG tuberculosis vaccine is made from which bacterium?

Mycobacterium bovis, a TB germ of cattle, was weakened by growing it again and again on a bile mixture, and in 1921 BCG was first given to a newborn in Paris.

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

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman showed that chemically modifying the bases in lab-made mRNA largely stopped it setting off inflammation, work that won them the 2023 Nobel Prize.

The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines package their RNA inside what?

Lipid nanoparticles are tiny fatty bubbles that shield the fragile mRNA from being broken down and help it get into cells.

The Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine delivers its instructions inside which kind of virus?

An adenovirus: Oxford's is a modified chimpanzee virus with key genes deleted, so it can't copy itself and cause an infection while delivering the spike-protein gene.

The 1976 US swine flu vaccination campaign was halted after cases of which rare nerve disorder?

Guillain–Barré syndrome: the campaign began after swine flu struck soldiers at Fort Dix, raising fears of a pandemic like that of 1918.

Which US president founded the charity now called the March of Dimes?

Franklin D. Roosevelt's charity, launched in 1938, went on to fund the research behind Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, which Roosevelt didn't live to see.

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

An adjuvant can hold the vaccine at the injection site a little longer or rouse nearby immune cells, strengthening the response.

Which country music star's $1 million gift to Vanderbilt University helped fund early testing of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine?

Dolly Parton: when she got her own shot in 2021, she posted a video singing a reworked 'Jolene' to urge fans to get vaccinated.

Which mercury-containing vaccine ingredient was removed from most US childhood vaccines as a precaution?

Thiomersal: a 1999 US review found no harm beyond local reactions, but some infants' totals could exceed EPA mercury guidelines, so US health bodies urged its removal.

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

Preservatives: the royal commission found the bottle held no antiseptic, so repeated use let Staphylococcus aureus grow inside it.

A 2019 Danish study of over 650,000 children found what about the MMR vaccine and autism?

No increased risk: the 1998 Lancet paper that started the scare was retracted in 2010, and the BMJ later declared it fraudulent.

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

Egg protein: yet health officials no longer tell people with egg allergies to avoid flu shots.

Whose cells, taken without her consent in 1951, were mass-produced to test Jonas Salk's polio vaccine?

Henrietta Lacks's tumour cells became HeLa, the first human cell line that kept multiplying in the lab, so they could be grown in huge volumes.

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

Acellular pertussis vaccines hold only parts of the germ, and because they cause fewer side effects than whole-cell shots, wealthier countries mostly use them.

The blood of which sea creature is used in a test that checks vaccines for bacterial toxins?

Horseshoe crab: its blood cells clot when they meet bacterial toxins, so a test made from them flags contaminated doses.

A vaccine against which disease that mostly strikes older adults first arrived in 2006?

Shingles comes from the chickenpox virus, which stays in the body after chickenpox and can reawaken decades later.

Which Pacific island nation shut its government services for two days in 2019 to fight a deadly measles outbreak?

Samoa: unvaccinated families were told to hang red flags outside their homes so vaccination teams could find them.

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

The FDA runs VAERS jointly with the CDC, and because anyone can file a report, a report alone can't show that a vaccine caused a problem.

Which disease did Maurice Hilleman's daughter catch in 1963, giving him the virus for his vaccine against it?

Mumps: the Jeryl Lynn strain grown from her went into Merck's combined MMR shot and has helped control mumps for decades.

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

India: in 2021 the government halted the Serum Institute's vaccine exports to meet demand at home, leaving the COVAX sharing scheme short of doses.

Which country's 'No Jab, No Pay' policy withholds family payments from parents whose children aren't fully vaccinated?

Australia: from 2016 the policy stopped accepting parents' non-medical objections as a reason to keep the payments.

Which COVID-19 vaccine initially needed ultra-cold storage at −80 to −60 °C?

Pfizer–BioNTech: in February 2021 US regulators relaxed that, letting undiluted vials sit in ordinary pharmaceutical freezers for up to two weeks.

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.

In 2011, which animal disease became the first disease declared eradicated since smallpox?

Rinderpest: it could kill whole herds of cattle, and its spread through Africa set off extensive famines.

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

Vaccine hesitancy, the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate, threatens to undo progress against diseases such as measles, the WHO warned.

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

Somalia: yet a year later a Birmingham medical photographer caught smallpox from a university laboratory and became its last recorded death.

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

The bifurcated needle held one dose between its prongs, and its low cost and efficiency helped the smallpox eradication campaign succeed.

HPV vaccines were designed mainly to prevent which cancer?

Cervical cancer: HPV spreads through sex, so the WHO urges vaccinating girls aged 9 to 14, before they become sexually active.

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

To maximise its global distribution: Salk took no money from it, though lawyers for his backers had also judged the vaccine likely unpatentable.

Which singer got a polio shot in front of the press before going on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956?

Elvis Presley rolled up his sleeve for a New York health official at a time when fewer than 1 percent of American teenagers had been immunised.

Which 1964 film has a song inspired by its songwriter's son taking polio vaccine on a sugar cube?

Mary Poppins owes A Spoonful of Sugar to lyricist Robert Sherman asking his son Jeffrey whether that day's vaccination had hurt. The boy said it was only medicine on a cube of sugar.

An 81-year-old Warwickshire man, second in Britain's COVID-19 vaccine rollout, shared his name with which writer?

William Shakespeare was the first man vaccinated, straight after 90-year-old Margaret Keenan, and he came from the playwright's home county.

Which ruler at war with Britain freed two English prisoners at Edward Jenner's request?

Napoleon said he could refuse nothing to such a benefactor of mankind. He also had his own troops vaccinated and awarded the English doctor a medal.

Which billionaire's foundation was a founding partner of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in 2000?

Bill Gates's foundation joined the World Bank and two UN agencies to found the alliance, which has since helped immunise more than a billion children.

Which name did the US give its 2020 operation to accelerate COVID-19 vaccines?

Operation Warp Speed paid for manufacturing before anyone knew whether the vaccine candidates worked, so doses were ready to ship the moment regulators agreed.

Which Russian ruler made English doctor Thomas Dimsdale a baron for inoculating her against smallpox?

Catherine the Great wanted her own example to reassure subjects who were frightened of the procedure, and she had her son Paul treated as well.

Before his vaccine work, Edward Jenner entered the Royal Society for a study of which bird?

Cuckoo chicks, Jenner showed, heave their nestmates out by themselves, a claim not fully believed until an artist later watched a blind nestling do it.

BCG, a tuberculosis vaccine, is also a standard treatment for early cancer of which organ?

Bladder tumours are treated by running the live vaccine into the organ through a catheter, where it rouses the immune system to attack the cancer.

Which researcher first tried the sugar-cube oral polio vaccine on himself and his family?

Albert Sabin's live vaccine was then given to more than 90 million people in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and elsewhere between 1955 and 1961.

Which UN agency supplies the vaccines that reach almost half of the world's children under five?

UNICEF forecasts what countries will need, buys on their behalf and publishes the prices it pays, which keeps the vaccine market open to scrutiny.

Which upper-arm muscle is the usual site for vaccine injections of 1 mL or less in adults?

Deltoid injections suit the small volume of most vaccines, while babies under seven months get theirs in the outer thigh instead.

The tetanus vaccine guards against an infection long known by which nickname, after its first sign?

Lockjaw names the jaw spasms that open the illness. The bacterium behind it is commonly found in soil, saliva, dust and manure.

Ervebo, in 2019 the first vaccine for its target to win WHO approval, protects against which virus?

Ebola was being fought with the shot before it was licensed: it was used widely under compassionate-use rules during the Kivu epidemic in DR Congo.

The live flu vaccine, unlike the standard flu shot, is not injected but given by which route?

Nasal spray flu vaccine carries live but weakened virus, whereas the injected kind is made from virus that has been killed.

Official smallpox virus stocks survive in two laboratories: one in Russia and one in which US city?

Atlanta holds the American stock at the Centers for Disease Control, and scientists have argued since 1980 over whether both stocks should finally be destroyed.

Which journal fully retracted in 2010 Andrew Wakefield's paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism?

The Lancet's editor called the paper wholly false and said the journal had been deceived. Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register three months later.

Which chemical, familiar from embalming, is used in vaccine making to inactivate viruses and toxins?

Formaldehyde, in the solution called formalin, killed the poliovirus for Jonas Salk's injected vaccine while leaving it able to train the immune system.

Squalene, an oil added to some flu vaccines to boost immune response, first came from which animals?

Sharks gave the oil its name, from the genus Squalus, and worries about hunting them have pushed producers to look for other sources.

Which country made its own COVID-19 vaccines, including Abdala, named after a drama by José Martí?

Cuba had inoculated 9.9 million of its 11.2 million residents with home-grown shots by the spring of 2022, and it also shipped doses to Venezuela.

A human vaccine against which tick-borne infection was sold in the US from 1998, then withdrawn in 2002?

Lyme disease vaccine LYMErix was pulled when sales plummeted amid side-effect claims the evidence never backed, a story that journals call a cautionary tale.

Pandemrix, a swine flu vaccine used in 2009, was linked in Finland and Sweden to which sleep disorder?

Narcolepsy turned up in roughly one child or teenager for every 18,400 doses, and Finland's health agency advised stopping the shots once the first cases came to light.

Arexvy in 2023 became the first US-approved vaccine against which virus, after attempts dating from the 1960s?

RSV vaccine research was set back for decades by an early trial in which vaccinated infants fell more seriously ill on meeting the virus, and two died.

Which stage of clinical trials must show a vaccine safe and effective at large scale just before approval?

Phase 3 is the last hurdle before regulators see the data. The stage after it only begins once the vaccine is licensed and in general use.

Which future president backed Benjamin Waterhouse's cowpox vaccine drive after John Adams proved unresponsive?

Thomas Jefferson answered Waterhouse's letter on Christmas Day 1800 and soon offered his support. Waterhouse gave the first vaccinations in the United States to four of his own children.

What was the name of the cow whose cowpox supplied the pus for Edward Jenner's first vaccination?

Blossom's hide now hangs on a library wall at St George's medical school in London, while her horns are kept at Jenner's old house in Gloucestershire.

Janet Parker, the last person known to die of smallpox, caught it in 1978 at a medical school in which city?

Birmingham's medical school grew the virus one floor below the room where she worked as a photographer, and exactly how it reached her has never been settled.

Which South African-born virologist won the 1951 Nobel Prize for developing the yellow fever vaccine?

Max Theiler became the first African-born Nobel laureate, honoured fourteen years after he developed the vaccine in 1937.

Most COVID-19 vaccines teach the body to recognise which coronavirus protein, the one used to enter cells?

Spike protein draws a strong immune response by itself, so a vaccine can show the body that one piece instead of the whole virus.

Which American company's single-dose COVID-19 vaccine was developed by its Janssen arm in the Netherlands?

Johnson & Johnson's shot needed only one dose and no freezer, staying viable for months in a standard refrigerator.

The chickenpox vaccine is built on a virus strain called Oka, developed in the early 1970s in which country?

Japan's Michiaki Takahashi began the work in 1971 after watching his eldest son suffer from chickenpox, and finished it within two years.

Which initiative, directed by Gavi, CEPI and the WHO, was set up to share COVID-19 vaccines fairly worldwide?

COVAX, short for COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, had delivered 2 billion doses by the time it officially closed at the end of 2023.

Kidney cells from which animals were used to grow the poliovirus for the first polio vaccines?

Monkeys' kidney cells were found in 1960 to be infected with a virus of their own, SV40, which was only discovered that same year.

Which pork-derived stabiliser in some vaccines has prompted rulings from Jewish and Muslim religious leaders?

Gelatin protects a vaccine from temperature changes so it does not degrade in storage, and some religious leaders have ruled it no reason to refuse a vaccine that is injected instead of eaten.

Which strategy, vaccinating each new patient's contacts and then their contacts, helped wipe out smallpox?

Ring vaccination builds layers of protected people around every case, so teams could contain outbreaks without having to reach an entire population.

Pastor Henning Jacobson's refusal of a smallpox shot led to a 1905 Supreme Court ruling for which state's law?

Massachusetts had fined the Cambridge pastor $5, and the Court's ruling upheld the power of states to enforce compulsory vaccination.

What was the occupation of Benjamin Jesty, who used cowpox against smallpox twenty years before Edward Jenner?

Farmer Benjamin Jesty infected his wife and two eldest sons with cowpox during a 1774 epidemic, but he never publicised the result.

At which university were the results of the giant field trial of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine announced in 1955?

Michigan was where Salk had trained under Thomas Francis, the man who then ran the trial, the largest medical experiment in history at the time.

Maurice Hilleman developed most of his forty vaccines after joining which pharmaceutical company in 1957?

Merck retired him at its mandatory age of 65, then had him direct a new vaccine institute, where he worked for another twenty years.

Which Oxford vaccine scientist had a Barbie doll made in her honour by Mattel in 2021?

Sarah Gilbert co-developed the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, approved for use in the UK on 30 December 2020, and the doll cast her as a role model.

Which country halted school Dengvaxia shots in 2017 over fears the dengue vaccine could worsen some infections?

The Philippines had been the first Asian country to approve the vaccine, which its maker then warned was riskier for people who had never had dengue.

Flu vaccines need regular updating because of slight mutations in the virus, a process called antigenic what?

Drift is why new versions of the flu shot are developed twice a year, with a recipe recommended for each hemisphere.

Which English city, facing 3,000 vaccination prosecutions, held a mass rally against compulsory vaccination in 1885?

Leicester went on to control smallpox its own way, by reporting cases and isolating patients and contacts, a method that shaped the final push to wipe the disease out.

Calmette and Guérin, the C and G of the BCG vaccine, began developing it in 1908 in which French city?

Lille was where the physician and the veterinarian began 13 years of work, subculturing the germ 239 times on a potato medium until it was safe to give.

Compounds from which Chilean tree are added to the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine to strengthen the immune response?

Soapbark's bark yields saponins, compounds that rouse the immune system, and the tree's Mapuche name likewise means soap.

Which nine-year-old, bitten by a dog thought rabid, became in 1885 the first person given a rabies vaccine?

Joseph Meister never developed the disease, and as an adult he worked as caretaker at the institute named after the scientist who had treated him.

In the 1955 Cutter incident, batches of polio vaccine harmed children because they still contained what?

Live virus survived in some 120,000 doses that had passed the required safety tests, and the polio it caused spread to the children's families and communities.

Which service club network launched PolioPlus in 1985 to immunise all of the world's children against polio?

Rotary's commitment inspired the WHO's 1988 resolution to eradicate polio, and its clubs handle fundraising, advocacy and volunteer recruitment for the campaign.

Rotavirus vaccines, given to babies by mouth, protect against the leading cause of which severe childhood symptom?

Diarrhea of this kind kills far fewer children where the vaccines are used: they prevent between 37 and 96 percent of the risk of death among the young.

Vaccine vial monitors, small squares printed on vial labels, darken to warn that a vaccine was exposed to what?

Heat makes the inner square darken, and once it matches the circle around it health workers know the dose is damaged and must be thrown away.