Jenner took 5 years to publish his theories on smallpox

Posted on: July 15, 2020 at 17:37:38 CT

treatments. 160 years later, the WHO attempted to eradicate the virus through vaccines. Finally, 18 years later, the virus was deemed eradicated in 1980.

The first major Polio outbreak in the US occurred in 1894, but a vaccine deemed "safe and effective" wasn't produced for another 60 years. Polio still exists today with hundreds of cases reported worldwide.

Diptheria has been around since the 1600s and was identified as a bacteria in 1883. It took another 7 years to develop an experimental antitoxin that was used on animals, then another 5 years to actually start producing treatments suitable for humans. After about 50 years worth of botched vaccines that killed scores of recipients, a somewhat reliable treatment was finally developed in the 1950s and 25 years later accepted by the WHO. Diptheria still exists today, with the most recent recorded death occurring in Spain in 2015.

Pertussis has been around forever. A vaccine wasn't developed until the 30s, wasn't used widely until the 50s, and didn't show significant reductions in cases until the 70s. In 2012 there were over 48,000 reported cases of pertussis in the US, and there are an estimated 24,000,000 cases every year worldwide. Or put another way, roughly twice as many cases of whooping cough than there are of Covid-19.


But hey, if you think a safe and effective vaccine for a newly discovered virus can be identified, tested, produced, distributed and administered worldwide in just a few short months... OK. I'll let you guys go first.