The author is a contributing editor to the Financial Times and author of Foreign Bodies: Epidemics, Vaccines and National Health
If artificial intelligence godfather Geoffrey Hinton’s prediction that our imperfect “biological intelligence” will be replaced by artificial versions, it will be because of the paradox that humans seem destined to fall into. We are both marvels of boundless creativity and a bundle of primitive impulses that have barely evolved: excruciating fear, conspiratorial doubt, and needy gratification. The latter often hinders the former. Irrationality stands in the way of hard-won scientific achievements.
When a Covid-19 vaccine is being developed and made available at record speed, I naively imagine that a pandemic will be one of those events where the common global interest may triumph over the nation out of sheer collective self-interest opportunism. Needless to say, this is not the case. To make matters worse, vaccines have become political football. Government agencies tasked with monitoring infectious disease epidemics and providing public health advice are now routinely accused by libertarians of being the tools of a deep state conspiracy aimed at stripping citizens of sovereignty over their own bodies. In some quarters, virology itself is caricatured as a professionally reckless and even sinister enterprise: contributing to the Sars-Cov-2 leak from a Chinese laboratory (so far, there is still no evidence of this event).
The demonization of vaccines and the fight to get them is old: I tried to write about it in foreign body. It is not surprising to resist the introduction of infectious substances into a healthy body and to believe that a little poison will save you.James Kirkpatrick, author Inoculation analysis (1754), wrote: “Searching for safety by rushing into the bosom of the plague (smallpox), it is naturally difficult to obtain a good reception. . . ”
To no avail, the first reports of successful vaccinations came from Ottoman Greek physicians, reporting that the practitioners were mostly elderly housewives. One of the most vehement critics of vaccination, William Wagstaffe, a physician at St. Barts’ Hospital in London, who argued that the quality of blood differed from country to country, wrote in 1722: “Subsequent generations will scarcely believe that An experiment carried out by an ignorant few “women among illiterate and thoughtless people” would be favored in “one of the most polite countries in the world.” . . ”
Even after the discovery of microbes by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 1880s, vaccines remained controversial. In 1899, Ukrainian-Jewish microbiologist Waldemar Haffkine, who invented vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague and vaccinated tens of thousands of volunteers in India, was hailed in London as the hero of the masses. savior. Huffkin vaccinated not only the native army, whose health the British government had an obvious strategic interest in, but also many of India’s poor — slum dwellers in Calcutta and Bombay; pilgrims and ascetics; Assamese Tea Plantation Workers – Trek thousands of miles in campaigns of grand scale.
But Huffkin has a past. In 1881, he was one of a group of Jewish students in Odessa who armed the community against the Holocaust and was imprisoned before being rescued by his professor, the pioneering immunologist Elie Metchnikoff3 Second-rate. Huvkin was rumored in some quarters to be a Russian spy, and the Indian medical service, skeptical of this new science, kept Huvkin at arm’s length, lacking funding, space and authority. As he wittily points out, mass vaccination would render the mandatory sanitization campaigns Britain has imposed on disease-plagued populations in cities like Hong Kong and Mumbai redundant: isolation camps segregating and dividing families; Check people and houses.
Ultimately, after a plague official was assassinated in Pune and a wave of strikes hit British India amid celebrations of Queen Victoria’s 50th accession, the imperial medical establishment put more faith in Huffkin’s data proving the effectiveness of his vaccine. He was awarded space in the old government building in Mumbai to set up a mass production facility, and within a remarkably short period of time, millions of doses were produced for use in India and exported to Asia, Australia and Africa.
But in 1902, Huffkin took responsibility when 19 Punjabi villagers died of tetanus poisoning after being vaccinated, even though the deadly contamination was ultimately found to have occurred on the village site rather than the production facility. Suspicious Russian Jews became scapegoats. The Governor, Lord Curzon, is furious, arguing that he should be tried and hanged for damaging Raj’s reputation for caring about his subjects. Haffkine was fired and his career was cut short. It took another three years and a crusade to overturn the appalling miscarriage of justice, vindicate him and send him back to India. But the damage was done; Huffkin’s life as a working scientist was effectively over, and his history all but forgotten.
Will the lessons of the recent and recent past pave the way for the next generation of vaccines when the next wave of infectious diseases hits? Or will vaccination be politicized again so that we trip over our own creativity again? The signs aren’t necessarily on the side of science. Robert Kennedy Junior, who believes that vaccines are the cause of autism in children (a theory that has been thoroughly debunked), has declared himself the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. It’s easy to see him as an unwelcome oddball. But just a few days ago, a reporter from a major American newspaper assured me that his campaign was far from unrealistic. Money and attention have clearly gone to Kennedy. This anti-science candidate is a worrying prospect. Just another cult item to add to our growing inventory of frustration.