The Dangers of Vaccine Denial
by The Daily Eye Team February 9 2015, 2:35 pm Estimated Reading Time: 0 mins, 39 secsFirst, a word on vaccines: They have revolutionized public health. Can you name the discoverer of the smallpox vaccine? Probably not: Edward Jenner is little known today. He lived roughly when Napoleon did, and (by my back-of-envelope calculations) he managed before he died to save many millions more lives than Napoleon cost in his wars over the same period. All told, up to the present, Jenner’s vaccine appears to have saved more than half a billion lives since 1800, notes Dr. D.A. Henderson, who led the effort to eradicate smallpox. Jenner should be counted as one of the great heroes of the modern world, yet he is forgotten while everybody knows of Napoleon. That’s emblematic of the way vaccines get short shrift.