03.22.10
Not exactly Edward Jenner
Edward Jenner was a benefactor to mankind.
As a country doctor in the west of England, Jenner discovered vaccination. Indeed, the word vaccination — was taken by Jenner from the Latin word for cow, “vacca,” stemming for his discovery that women infected with cowpox — a lesser disease than the killer smallpox — acquired immunity to the latter.
So by scraping pus from cowpox sores on cows and administering it to people, Jenner invented the first vaccination by live virus.
More recently, there was news from the US-funded war on terror on the planned acquisition of 20 million doses of a new smallpox vaccine for the national stockpile.
The FDA has granted approval to Bavarian Nordic’s new and modern smallpox vaccine. BN, a Danish company, is one of the firms from the Alliance for Biosecurity, a small bioterror defense consortium put together after 9/11 to facilitate the transfer of BARDA-funding to private industry.
The CDC page on smallpox vaccination notes there is already enough smallpox vaccine “in the stockpile to vaccinate every person in the United States in the event of a smallpox emergency.”
That vaccine is a live virus preparation, its nature well-explained at the CDC.
The last vaccination against smallpox in the US occured in 1972. DD can even recall his smallpox vaccination as a child. It resulted in a big itchy scab and left a small scar. Kids were keen to look at each other’s scabs, as I recall.
This was back in those quaint days when people didn’t become apoplectic at the tyrannical idea of the government doing something good for their general well being. Fox News, if it had existed in the Sixties and Seventies, would have doubtless condemned smallpox vaccination as an attack on personal liberties and unconstitutional, much like the locals used to get inflamed over fluoridation.
“Shares in Bavarian jumped as much as 22 percent to their highest level since January 2008 and traded 13 percent up at 247 Danish crowns at 0923 GMT,” reported Reuters.