Vaccine Trivia
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100 free Vaccine trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This vaccine trivia quiz covers the medical technology that has saved more lives than almost any other. The easy questions handle the basics: what a vaccine does, why the word comes from cows, who Edward Jenner was, which disease has been eradicated and what herd immunity means. The harder end goes into the science and the history: variolation in China and Turkey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Newgate prisoners, the 1804 arm-to-arm expedition to the Spanish colonies, Pasteur's chicken cholera and anthrax vaccines, attenuated versus inactivated versus toxoid versus subunit vaccines, why the polio vaccine's serotype 2 had to be reduced, thiomersal, egg-grown flu shots, the DIVA vaccines used on pigs, the mRNA pioneers, and the three countries where polio still lingers. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our medicine, medical history and human body quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What kind of protection does a vaccine provide?
Active acquired immunity
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.
Q 02Which Salem-era Puritan minister learned about smallpox inoculation from Onesimus, a man he enslaved?
Cotton Mather
Cotton Mather pressed Boston's doctors to inoculate during the 1721 epidemic, and someone hurled a lit grenade into his home.
Q 03Which Founding Father lost his four-year-old son to smallpox, then regretted never having the boy inoculated?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin told the story in his autobiography for parents who avoided inoculation, fearing they could never forgive themselves if it went wrong.
Q 04In 2021, the WHO recommended the first vaccine against which disease, a leading killer of young African children?
Malaria
Malaria: the RTS,S shot cut deadly severe malaria among young children, and in 2023 the WHO backed a second vaccine, R21.
Q 05Who brought the folk practice of smallpox inoculation from Turkey to Britain in 1721?
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose face smallpox had scarred, had her own young daughter inoculated when an epidemic threatened England.
Q 06In which country was inoculation against smallpox first recorded, in the 16th century?
China
China: healers there blew smallpox material up children's noses, sometimes grinding dried scabs into a powder first.
Q 07What was the deliberate infection with smallpox material to prevent severe disease called?
Variolation
Variolation usually caused a milder case than catching smallpox naturally, but patients could still die or spread it, so England banned it in 1840.
Q 08Charles Maitland tested smallpox inoculation on condemned prisoners at which London prison?
Newgate
Newgate: the prisoners had been promised their freedom for undergoing the experiment, and every one of them survived.
Q 09During the American Revolution, which general ordered the mass smallpox inoculation of his troops?
George Washington
George Washington: inoculation had been forbidden in his army in 1776, but in 1777 he reversed that and had his soldiers inoculated.
Q 10In 1796, Edward Jenner scratched cowpox pus from a milkmaid's hand into the arm of which 8-year-old boy?
James Phipps
James Phipps: when Jenner later inoculated him with real smallpox, no disease developed, and Jenner concluded the protection was complete.
Q 11The Balmis expedition took smallpox vaccine to Spain's colonies using what method?
Arm-to-arm transfer between carriers
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.
Q 12Which scientist developed vaccines against chicken cholera and anthrax in the 1880s?
Louis Pasteur
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.
Q 13What is the effect whereby a highly vaccinated population makes outbreaks unlikely even for the unvaccinated?
Herd immunity
Q 21Which vaccine for babies links a bacterium's sugary outer coat to a carrier protein to strengthen the immune response?
Hib vaccine
Hib vaccine: a plain sugar-coat version worked less well and was replaced from 1987 by the conjugate, after which Hib meningitis fell sharply.
Q 22The BCG tuberculosis vaccine is made from which bacterium?
Mycobacterium bovis
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.
Q 23Which two scientists won Columbia's Horwitz Prize in 2021 for pioneering mRNA vaccine technology?
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
Herd immunity protects people who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons, because the germ runs out of people to pass through.
Q 14In 2014, endemic wild poliovirus remained in parts of which three countries?
Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan
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.
Q 15A 2014–15 measles outbreak in California was traced to which theme park?
Disneyland
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.
Q 16Russia named the COVID-19 vaccine it approved in August 2020 after which Soviet space first?
Sputnik
Sputnik: Russia approved the vaccine on early results from small trials, before large trials had tested its safety and effectiveness.
Q 17After a vaccine dose, roughly how long does the body take to build its full antibody defence?
About 2 weeks
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.
Q 18Which type of vaccine is the MMR shot?
Attenuated
Attenuated vaccines like MMR use live but weakened viruses, giving durable immunity, but they may be unsafe for people with weakened immune systems.
Q 19Which type of vaccine are the tetanus and diphtheria shots?
Toxoid
Toxoid vaccines followed years of treating tetanus with antitoxin from immunised horses, which gave some patients severe allergic reactions.
Q 20The hepatitis B vaccine is an example of which type of vaccine?
Subunit
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.
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.
Q 24The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines package their RNA inside what?
Lipid nanoparticles
Lipid nanoparticles are tiny fatty bubbles that shield the fragile mRNA from being broken down and help it get into cells.
Q 25The Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine delivers its instructions inside which kind of virus?
An adenovirus
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.
Q 26The 1976 US swine flu vaccination campaign was halted after cases of which rare nerve disorder?
Guillain–Barré syndrome
Guillain–Barré syndrome: the campaign began after swine flu struck soldiers at Fort Dix, raising fears of a pandemic like that of 1918.
Q 27Which US president founded the charity now called the March of Dimes?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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.
Q 28What is the name for a substance added to a vaccine to boost the immune response?
An adjuvant
An adjuvant can hold the vaccine at the injection site a little longer or rouse nearby immune cells, strengthening the response.
Q 29Which country music star's $1 million gift to Vanderbilt University helped fund early testing of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine?
Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton: when she got her own shot in 2021, she posted a video singing a reworked 'Jolene' to urge fans to get vaccinated.
Q 30Which mercury-containing vaccine ingredient was removed from most US childhood vaccines as a precaution?
Thiomersal
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.