The author is a contributing editor to the FT and author of “Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations”
If Geoffrey Hinton’s prediction, godfather of AI, that our imperfect “biological intelligence” will be supplanted by the artificial version comes true, then it will be because of the paradox in which humanity seems fatally trapped. We are at once a marvel of infinite ingenuity, but also a bundle of newly evolved primitive impulses: excruciating fears, suspected conspirators, and needy gratification. Too often the latter get in the way of the former; unreasonable that nullifies the hard-earned achievements of science.
When Vaccines against covid-19 were created and made available at record speed, I naively imagined that the pandemic would be one of those events where, out of pure collective self-interest, the common and global good could prevail over nationalist opportunism. Needless to say, this is not what happened. Worse, vaccines have since become a political football. Government agencies responsible for monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and providing public health advice are now routinely accused by libertarians of being the tools of a deep state conspiracy bent on robbing citizens of sovereignty over their own bodies. In some quarters, virology is itself caricatured as a reckless or even sinister professional feat: the enabler of a Chinese laboratory leak of Sars-Cov-2 (an event for which, to date, there is still no evidence ).
The demonization of vaccines, and the battle for their acceptance, has a long history: a history that I have tried to write foreign bodies. The resistance to introducing infectious matter into a healthy body, in the belief that a little poison would save you, is not surprising. James Kirkpatrick, the author of the Inoculation analysis (1754), wrote: “To seek safety from a distemper [smallpox] rushing into his embraces she might naturally have very little tendency to win him a good reception. . . ”
It didn’t help that the first reports of successful inoculation came from Greek doctors in the Ottoman Empire, who reported that the practitioners were mostly elderly matrons. One of inoculation’s fiercest critics, William Wagstaffe, a physician at St Bart’s Hospital in London, who believed that different nations had different blood qualities, wrote in 1722 that “Posterity will hardly be led to believe that an experiment practiced by a few ignorant women among an illiterate and unthinking people” would find favor in “one of the most educated nations in the world . . . ”
Even after the microbial revelations of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 1880s, vaccines remained controversial. In 1899, the Ukrainian Jewish microbiologist Waldemar Haffkine, who had created vaccines against cholera and the bubonic plague and inoculated tens of thousands of volunteers in India, was hailed in London as a savior of the masses. Haffkine had vaccinated not only the indigenous troops in whose health the British government had an obvious strategic interest, but also multitudes of India’s poor: slum dwellers in Calcutta and Bombay; pilgrims and farmers; workers in the tea plantations of Assam, who travel thousands of kilometers in epic campaigns.
But Haffkine had a past. In 1881 he had been one of a group of Jewish students in Odessa that armed the community against pogroms and had been imprisoned three times before being fired by his professor, the pioneering immunologist Elie Metchnikoff. In some circles he is said to be a Russian spy, the Indian Doctor The service, suspicious of the new science, kept Haffkine at arm’s length, hungry for funds, space and authority. Mass vaccination, as he tactlessly pointed out, would make redundant the coercive disinfection campaigns the British have imposed on disease-stricken populations in cities like Hong Kong and Bombay: segregation camps that isolate and divide families; destroy homes and properties; forced inspections of people and homes.
Finally, after a plague officer was assassinated in Pune during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations and British India was hit by strike waves, the imperial medical establishment gave more credence to Haffkine’s data which showed the efficacy of its vaccines. He was given space in Bombay’s old Government House to establish what became a mass production facility where, in an incredibly short time, millions of doses were produced for Indian use, as well as being exported to Asia, Australia and Africa.
But when, in 1902, 19 Punjabi villagers died of tetanus poisoning following vaccinations, Haffkine took the blame, even though the fatal contamination, it was eventually revealed, took place at the village site rather than the plant. production. The doubting Russian Jew became a scapegoat; Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, was furious that he should be tried and hanged for bringing into disrepute the Raj’s reputation for caring for his subjects. Haffkine was fired, his career cut short. It took another three years and a crusade to reverse the terrible mistrial to avenge him and bring him back to India. But the damage had been done; Haffkine’s life as a working scientist was effectively over, and his story all but faded into oblivion.
When the next wave of infectious diseases hits, will the lessons of the recent and older past pave the way for the next generation of vaccines? Or will vaccination be politicized once again so that, once again, we stumble upon our own inventiveness? Signs are not necessarily on the side of science. Robert Kennedy Junior, who claimed that vaccines were a cause of autism in children (a theory that has been largely debunked), has declared himself a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States. It is tempting to dismiss him as an ineligible eccentric. But just a few days ago, a reporter for an American newspaper assured me that his campaign was anything but quixotic. Apparently the money and attention is already flowing to Kennedy. This candidacy against science is an alarming prospect; just another feverish item to add to our growing inventory of dismay.
—————————————————-
Source link