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A man called Edward Jenner pioneered a technique for resisting certain illnesses that almost all of you will have experienced. He developed a vaccine for a disease called smallpox and today most children in England and other countries around the world are given a vaccination against a wide variety of diseases, including measles, mumps and rubella. People say that the work Jenner did has saved more lives than the work of any other human being. In 2002 he was named by the BBC as one of the 100 greatest Britons.
Vaccination is when you are given a very mild dose of the disease which makes you immune, meaning you can't catch it, to that disease in the future. Jenner first used his smallpox vaccination on a young 8-year-old boy.
England already had a reputation for medical discovery as, way back in the 16th century, a man called William Harvey had been the first to explain the flow of blood around the body and how the four valves in the heart worked.
And now, in 2020, scientists are searching for a vaccination against the new Covid-19 illness, a virus of the coronavirus family. Even though countries all over the world are working to find a vaccine it looks
as though it will be at least a year before anything is available. Not only does a vaccine need to be developed but then it has to be tested to make sure that it has no harmful effects.
Well I got that wrong. The scientists did it in less than a year and by now (February 2021) I have had my first dose.
