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"Vaccine facts" seems to have become a surprisingly loaded term over the last couple years, but the history of vaccines is actually full of heated opinions and outlandish ideas. In this video, we drill down to just the facts about vaccination and the history of vaccines. You'll learn about the first vaccine, what an mRNA vaccine does (and does not) do, and why anti-vaxxers are not a new phenomenon. In case you forgot, The List Show is a trivia-tastic, fact-filled show for curious people. Subscribe here for new Mental Floss episodes every Wednesday: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpZ5qUqpW4hW4zdfuBxMSJA?sub_confirmation=1 Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1 About Mental Floss: Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more. Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided. 2025 Mental Floss 21 Vaccine Facts | Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
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0:00
British physician Edward Jenner is usually thought of as the father of vaccination. But
0:03
did you know that someone else introduced inoculation to England several decades earlier
0:07
In other parts of the world, in fact, the practice had been happening for centuries. Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy. We're covering that and much more in this episode of The List Show
0:14
from historical anti-vaxxers to a heartwarming fact about the polio vaccine that isn't exactly
0:19
what it seems. Let's get started. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, born in 1689, was a poet and essayist married to the British
0:31
ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. When she was 26, a bout with smallpox left her with facial scars
0:37
She and her husband moved to Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, Turkey, in 1716. Lady
0:42
Mary explored the city's women-only apartments and public baths, where she witnessed Ottoman
0:46
women inoculating people against distemper. In a letter, she described the women applying
0:50
the matter of the best sort of smallpox to small cuts in patients' arms or legs
0:55
after which they would suffer a very mild case of the disease and then recover. No one ever died, she wrote, and following the procedure, they were immune to the illness
1:03
Montague was so convinced of the practice's safety that she intended to introduce it to
1:06
the British medical establishment. In 1721, a smallpox outbreak in London prompted her to
1:11
have her daughter inoculated, the first known instance of the procedure in England
1:16
But many doctors remained skeptical. That August, an experiment that would never be
1:20
approved today was conducted at Newgate Prison. A group of inmates were given the option of freedom
1:24
if they submitted to inoculation and lived. They all survived. After that, the Princess of Wales
1:29
inoculated some of her children. And again, they were fine. The procedure became widespread
1:34
The Princess wasn't the only European royal worried about viruses. Russia's Catherine the Great
1:38
summoned an English doctor, Thomas Dimmesdale, to St. Petersburg in 1768 to administer a smallpox
1:43
inoculation to herself and her son, Grand Duke Paul. The operations had high stakes
1:48
While Dimmesdale prepared the injection, there were said to be a number of carriages at the
1:52
the ready in case something went wrong and the doctor needed to escape an angry mob of the
1:56
Empress's followers. Fortunately, the top-secret procedure went off without a hitch. The same year as the Newgate prison experiment, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was suffering from
2:04
its own smallpox outbreak. Years earlier, the colony tried to keep the disease at bay by
2:08
initiating the first quarantine in the North American colonies. Governor John Winthrop ordered
2:13
all ships arriving from the Caribbean, in which yellow fever was widespread, to remain offshore
2:17
until cases of the plague or like infectious diseases were resolved. Epidemics still struck
2:22
the colony fairly regularly. It would take a while for inoculation to be adopted on this side of the
2:26
Atlantic, but information supporting the practice already existed in a number of cultures
2:31
By the early 1700s, forms of inoculation had been practiced in India and China for more than a
2:36
century. The written record is a bit spare, with explicit references dating only to around the mid
2:41
1500s. Some experts believe the practice significantly predates that record, though. the information may have been passed down as part of an oral tradition
2:49
By 1714, a couple of years before Lady Montague arrived in the Ottoman Empire
2:53
a physician named Emmanuel Timonius wrote about how inoculation was becoming increasingly prevalent
2:58
in Constantinople, in a letter printed in Philosophical Transaction. Two years later
3:02
Puritan minister Cotton Mather, best known for his role in the Salem witch trials
3:06
wrote his own letter supporting Timonius' account. Mather probably hadn't witnessed inoculation at this point, but he had second-hand knowledge of the practice from an enslaved man
3:14
who worked for him. Mather described an incident in which he asked the man, whom he called Onesimus
3:19
if he had ever had smallpox. Onesimus answered, both yes and no, and described how people in his
3:25
homeland applied infectious pus to patients' scratched arms, rendering them immune to the
3:29
disease. Again, the written record makes it hard to trace this tradition. For what it's worth
3:34
a late 18th century French writer later claimed that many West Africans had been conducting inoculations since time immemorial In any case when Boston was hit by a smallpox epidemic in 1721 Mather urged doctors to use inoculation in their fight against the disease As in England many were skeptical Some argued that inoculation went
3:52
against God's commandments. Someone even threw a grenade through Mather's window with a note
3:57
that read, Cotton Mather, you dog, damn you. I'll inoculate you with this, with a pox to you
4:02
One doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, did inoculate nearly 300 patients. The process was far from
4:07
perfect. Roughly 2 percent of those patients died. But compared to smallpox's fatality
4:11
rate of about 15 to 30 percent, Boylston's meticulous records demonstrated to many that
4:16
inoculation had the potential to save lots of lives. Inoculation, or lack thereof, played a role in the lives of America's founders. Benjamin
4:24
Franklin became a strong proponent of the medical intervention after losing his four-year-old
4:28
son Francis to smallpox in November 1736. Some in Philadelphia began a rumor that the
4:33
boy was inoculated but had died anyway. Franklin set the record straight and later wrote in his
4:38
autobiography, I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by
4:44
inoculation. This I mentioned for the sake of parents who omit that operation on the supposition
4:49
that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it. My example showing that the
4:53
regret may be the same either way and that therefore the safer should be chosen. In 1764
4:59
the future second president John Adams was inoculated in Boston during yet another smallpox
5:03
outbreak there. At the time, doctors accompanied the procedure with an unnecessary regimen
5:08
of purging and sweating via large doses of mercury and, oddly enough, milk
5:13
Adams wrote in his autobiography that the treatment caused him to drool so much that
5:16
every tooth in his head loosened. By such means, they conquered the smallpox, which I
5:21
had very lightly, but they rendered me incapable of speaking or eating in my old age. In short
5:26
the same situation with my friend Washington. Speaking of Washington, the commander-in-chief insisted that all of his troops in the Continental
5:32
Army get inoculated. In 1776, half of the 10,000 Continental Army soldiers in Quebec
5:38
including their commander, came down with smallpox. The unit retreated, leaving the territory
5:43
in British hands and arguably leading to Canada's status as a separate country today. The defeat
5:48
may have convinced Washington to mandate inoculation for the Army in 1777
5:53
Inoculation did have a few drawbacks. One was that newly inoculated patients could pass
5:57
on the disease as they recovered from their mild case. And there was no standardized dosage
6:01
to ensure that the case would, in fact, be mild. It was better than nothing, but left
6:05
a lot to be desired. Then Edward Jenner came along. Jenner's big breakthrough came from looking into how exposure
6:11
to a less deadly related virus conferred immunity to a deadlier one. In 1796, he treated a milkmaid
6:17
named Sarah Nelms for a cowpox infection, which she said she got from her cow Blossom
6:21
In his famous experiment, he took pus from Nelms' sores and inoculated an eight-year-old
6:25
boy named James Phipps with it. Phipps recovered, and Jenner inoculated the kid with smallpox
6:30
material. Phipps did not get sick. The procedure in which a weaker or dead virus confers immunity
6:35
became known as vaccination, after the Latin word waca, meaning cow. Technically, in Jenner's day at least, inoculation referred to the act of applying infectious
6:44
material to a skin lesion, while vaccination referred specifically to applying less dangerous
6:49
cowpox material to avert smallpox. Today, the two terms are often used interchangeably to refer to
6:54
any practice in which something is introduced to the body to help the immune system protect against
6:58
disease. Back in the 18th century, the bovine connection gave some people the wrong idea
7:03
Many were suspicious of a medical treatment derived from a cow—not to mention the concept
7:07
of purposefully getting one disease to prevent another. Some claimed that mingling animal and
7:11
human substances went against biblical tenets. A famous historical anti-vaxxer named Benjamin
7:15
Mosley even warned people that vaccination might lead to quadrupedant sympathy In other words at least half seriously it seems Mosley thought an unlucky vaccinated person might become attracted to cows Illustrator James Gilray captured the hysteria with a
7:30
cartoon depicting miniature cows morphing out of people's bodies. Of course, none of
7:34
those dire predictions came true. But what happened to Blossom, the only actual cow involved in the story? She likely recovered
7:41
from the cowpox infection, since its lesions tend to heal within a month or so. Today, her
7:45
hide is preserved and mounted at St. George's Medical School in London. And one of her horns
7:49
part of the collection at Dr. Jenner's House, Museum, and Garden in Gloucestershire, England
7:53
One problem with vaccination, however, was that scientists couldn't yet manufacture a vaccine
7:58
The viral material had to come from an already infected person. That made public health vaccination campaigns difficult. The Spanish government found an
8:06
unconventional, highly unethical workaround in 1803. King Carlos IV wanted to vaccinate people
8:11
in Spain's American and Philippine colonies. Physicians came up with a plan involving a ship
8:16
a crew, and 22 orphaned children. The idea was to set sail and then vaccinate the children in
8:21
succession, with one child providing the cowpox to the next one, and so on, forming a human chain
8:26
and ensuring access to the valuable viral material. While the kids were eventually settled in Mexico
8:31
the captain of the voyage, Francisco Javier de Balmiz, continued his round-the-world vaccination
8:36
mission for the next four years. Vaccination became the gold standard in medicine because it
8:40
it was so much safer than inoculation. In fact, the UK banned variolation, another name for
8:46
inoculation with a smallpox virus, in 1840 with the passage of the National Vaccination Act
8:51
This law also provided free vaccines for the poor, the first instance of free medical services in the
8:56
UK. Vaccination for newborns became mandatory there in 1853, and in 1855, Massachusetts passed
9:03
the first state law in the US requiring them for schoolchildren. With the need for vaccine doses
9:07
growing every year, scientists devised a method for propagating cowpox among calves for the use
9:12
in vaccines, a product they called animal vaccine. Basically, scientists harvested infectious fluid
9:17
from the cows for use in smallpox vaccines. This was safer than transferring pus from one person
9:22
to another because it cut down on the risk of transmitting other diseases such as syphilis
9:26
After a Boston physician introduced the concept to U.S. researchers, entrepreneurs quickly opened vaccine farms to increase production
9:33
The New York City Board of Health opened a vaccine farm in Clifton, New Jersey in 1876
9:37
to raise cows infected with cowpox. By 1897, more than 14 major vaccine farms operated across at
9:43
least six states. Dryvax, a smallpox vaccine manufactured by Wyeth Laboratories and used for
9:47
most of the 20th century in vaccination campaigns, was derived from a strain harvested at the New
9:52
York Board of Health vaccine farm. Smallpox received a lot of attention because it was so
9:56
deadly, but it wasn't the only viral disease for which scientists raced to create vaccines
10:01
French chemist Louis Pasteur developed the rabies vaccine in the 1880s. Previously
10:05
Pastor discovered that bacteria lost their virulence over time, a process he called attenuation
10:11
In a landmark 1881 experiment, he vaccinated a group of livestock twice with attenuated anthrax
10:16
vaccine and left a control group unvaccinated. About two weeks later, he exposed all of the
10:20
animals to live anthrax. Within a few days, you guessed it, the unvaccinated sheep and goats had
10:25
died while the vaccinated ones remained healthy. So, Pastor developed a similar tactic with the
10:30
lethal rabies virus. He and a colleague extracted tissue from rabid dogs and injected a solution
10:35
of it into a series of rabbits, where the virus weakened. Pasteur air-dried the rabbit's spinal
10:40
cords. Exposure to oxygen reduced the virus until it was no longer infectious, and then administered
10:45
the material to 50 more dogs, who remained healthy. Seems like a success, right? Two problems
10:51
Pasteur was not a medical doctor, and he definitely didn't have a license to test his vaccine in
10:56
humans. But that's exactly what he did when the mother of 9-year-old Joseph Meester brought the
11:00
boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog to Pester laboratory Over the course of 11 days Meester received 13 shots and survived As an adult Meester worked as a caretaker at the Institut Pester in Paris There a long
11:13
legend attached to the development of the polio vaccine in the early 1950s. Numerous researchers
11:18
were working on polio vaccines at the time, using forms of a live polio virus. Jonas Salk
11:23
a virologist at the University of Pittsburgh with funding from the National Foundation for
11:27
Infantile Paralysis, developed a vaccine using an inactivated virus, which was administered by
11:32
injection. He took what seemed like risky steps. He tested the vaccine by inoculating his family
11:38
and then launched a clinical trial of more than a million children aged between six and nine
11:43
But the trial showed the vaccine prevented infection. Salk did not patent the vaccine
11:48
allegedly because he wanted to give into children far and wide, regardless of cost
11:52
Could you patent the son, he asked in a televised conversation with Edward R. Murrow in 1955
11:57
People took it as a moral statement against patenting medical breakthroughs, But the reality is a bit more complicated
12:02
The year it was unveiled, according to Claire Gaudiani's The Greater Good, 80 million people
12:06
donated money to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. As Brian Palmer argued in a piece for Slate, in this particular case, patenting and profiting
12:15
off a vaccine that had been developed with so many donations would have been seen as double-charging
12:19
In fact, many of those donations were small sums from the not particularly well-off, helping
12:24
give rise to the Foundation's current name, the March of Dimes. Salk's public profile as a savior of children led TV viewers to assume his poetic rhetorical
12:32
question was meant to apply to all vaccines, in a purely altruistic vein, but it may have
12:36
been more contingent on the details of his particular vaccine and its origins
12:41
Viewers also didn't know that the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis had actually
12:45
looked into patenting the technology. Its lawyers concluded that the vaccine wouldn't be patentable because of prior art
12:51
In other words, because other researchers had been working on polio vaccines and Salk had
12:54
built on their research, his invention wasn't unique. It's not clear that the foundation ever
12:59
intended to profit on this hypothetical patent. It might have just been a way of preventing other
13:03
companies from making low-quality knockoffs of the vaccine. But it does perhaps undercut some of
13:08
the nobility of Salk's lofty question. Albert Sabin later developed a polio vaccine using the
13:13
live polio virus that could be administered orally, which made distribution much easier
13:18
And at the height of the Cold War, Sabin and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail P. Chumakov
13:22
collaborated on a vaccination campaign in the USSR. In 1959, 10 million Soviet children received
13:28
Sabin's oral vaccine. In 1960, 100 million people behind the Iron Curtain were vaccinated
13:33
In another instance of vaccine diplomacy, the USSR, with U.S. funding, provided millions of
13:39
doses of a freeze-dried smallpox vaccine to developing countries. We couldn't give you
13:43
facts about vaccines without mentioning the COVID-19 vaccines that are giving us a way
13:47
out of this pandemic. The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are mRNA vaccines. And while
13:53
it might seem like this technology just emerged from nowhere, scientists have been working on the
13:57
core ideas for decades, and it even tested mRNA vaccines before the current pandemic
14:03
mRNA vaccines don't contain any of the coronavirus, live or dead. Instead, when you receive your shot
14:09
molecules called messenger RNA tell your cells to start creating a spike protein that's found
14:13
the coronavirus itself. Then your immune system makes antibodies against that protein
14:19
You already have mRNA in every cell of your body. It's the protein that transports messages from your
14:24
DNA to the rest of your cells. The mRNA vaccines use the same kind of molecule to tell your cells
14:29
to make a harmless bit of the coronavirus' spike protein. After the protein is made
14:33
your cells break down the vaccine's mRNA. Despite what some misinformed online researchers might
14:38
claim, the vaccine doesn't change your DNA. And no, the shots don't contain microchips
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