Vaccination Then And Now Quotes & Sayings

If vaccination can be conscripted into acts of war, it can still be instrumental in works of love. — Eula Biss

On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus "the Vaccine Virus" - the word vaccine is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy's arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox patient - today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner had discovered and named vaccination - the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. "It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice," Jenner wrote in 1801. — Richard Preston

In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage. — Eula Biss

I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman. — Eula Biss

Vaccination is a public health issue because influenza is a highly contagious disease. If you don't vaccinate your child, his or her schoolmates are much more likely to become ill. That is why some places (New York, for example) are making the vaccine mandatory for school children. — Michael Specter

The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates.
The wolf, disarmed of ferocity, is now pillowed in the lady's lap. The cat, the little tiger of our island, whose natural home is the forest, is equally domesticated and caressed. The cow, the hog, the sheep, and the horse, are all, for a variety of purposes, brought under his care and dominion. — Edward Jenner

A free country? they asked. You should live so long. What's free about it, they reasoned, when the law forces you to educate your children and then endangers their lives to get them into school? — Betty Smith

The use of vaccine in the control of yellow fever should occupy more or less the same place that typhoid fever vaccine has in the control of typhoid fever. No sanitary authority would desire to substitute typhoid vaccine for the supply of pure water and food, so we must not accept the yellow fever vaccine as a substitute for the elimination of Aedes aegypti. The vaccine provides individual protection for the person who cannot be protected by more general measures. — Fred Lowe Soper

Her conclusion: "You just have to follow your own heart" when it comes to medical decision-making. — Emily Matchar

A big change is coming, and politicians, self-important scientists, and unctuously blathering religious leaders may want to, but will never be able to, stop it. There is no vaccination against thinking. Ideas know no boundaries and no censorship. And what's more, ideas have a dangerous tendency to spread like wildfire. — Erich Von Daniken

You know you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. — Groucho Marx

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination. — Eula Biss

Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs. — Bill Gates

I attained a triumph so complete that it is now rare to meet an American with marks of small pox on his face ... Benefits are valuable according to their duration and extent ... but the benign remedy Vaccination saves millions of lives every century, like the [gift] of the sun, universal and everlasting.
[Remark made near the end of his life] — Benjamin Waterhouse

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time. — Honore De Balzac

I would like to issue a Mt. Carmel-like challenge to any 10 unvaccinated priests of Baal. I will go into the next severe epidemic with 10 selected vaccinated persons and 10 selected unvaccinated persons, I should prefer to choose the later, 3 members of parliament,3 anti-vaccination doctors if they can be found, and 4 anti-vaccination propagandists. And I will make this promise, neither to jeer nor jibe when they catch the disease but to look after them as brothers and for the four or five who are certain to die, I will try to arrange the funerals with all the pomp and ceremony of an anti-vaccination demonstration. — William Osler

Unfortunately there is no vaccination to protect the soul from the menacing disease of social ignorance manifested by character-void homosapiens. — Tracey Bond

At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary, more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox. — George Bernard Shaw

Vaccination is one of the easiest things on the way to development. It's much easier than roads and a great education system. It's very basic. It's one of the first things you want to get right. — Bill Gates

I would not go so far as to say that vaccination has never saved a person from smallpox. It is a matter of record that thousands of the victims of this superstitious rite have been saved from smallpox by the immunizing potency of death. But it is a fact that the official statistics of England and Wales show unmistakably that, while vaccination has killed ten times more people than smallpox, there has been a decrease in smallpox concomitant with the decrease in vaccination ... It might be appropriately asked, in the words of the Vaccination Inquirer — Herbert M. Shelton

Twenty orphans, one of whom was vaccinated, were put on board a ship. On the eighth day, when a pustule had developed, a second orphan was vaccinated, and so on. When the ship reached its destination, the transfer of vaccinia was made to local residents and the vaccination chain continued. — D.A. Henderson

Compulsory vaccination is an outrage and a gross interference with the liberty of the people in a land of freedom. — Daniel D. Palmer

When vaccination programs are successful to the point where the disease is unfamiliar to physicians and public alike, then concerns can arise with real or perceived side effects of a vaccine that affect a very small minority of those vaccinated. Such concerns lead to fewer children being vaccinated and to increasing occurrence of the disease. — Peter Parham

When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator. — Eula Biss

I keep trying to forget, but I must remember. And gather the scattered continents of a self, once whole. Before they plant flags and boundary my destiny. Push down the watered mountains that blemish this soiled soul before the valleys of my conscience get the best of me. I'll need a passport just to simply reach the rest of me. A vaccination for a lesser god's bleak history. — Saul Williams

Publications by the World Health Organization show that diphtheria is steadily declining in most European countries, including those in which there has been no immunization. The decline began long before vaccination was developed. There is certainly no guarantee that vaccination will protect a child against the disease; in fact, over 30,000 cases of diphtheria have been recorded in the United Kingdom in fully immunized children. — Leon Chaitow

What opposite discoveries we have seen!
(Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.)
One makes new noses, one a guillotine,
One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets;
But vaccination certainly has been
A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets, ... — Lord Byron

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it's not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughter's genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination. — Nicholas D. Kristof

We've been using vaccination in some form for hundreds of years now. We have almost nothing in our modern medicine that we've been using that long, and it's been consistently productive even though, you know, the older vaccines were much more dangerous than vaccines we're using now. — Eula Biss

Futurism is almost like a vaccination. You inject a little bit of a denatured pathogen to prepare your body in case you encounter it for real. — Jamais Cascio