Vaccine Rush

From ancient times people have realized the importance of having good immune resistance towards diseases. Vaccine development is a tedious and delicate process, and humanity hopes for successful Covid-19 vaccines to normalize life in society.

- Sunil S Chiplunkar

One of the common terms in modern society is vaccine. Thanks to the pandemic Covid-19, the vaccine concept has become a common man’s interesting point. The process of vaccine administration is to confer immunity or resistance to specific diseases. From ancient times people have realized the importance of having good immune resistance towards diseases.

For instance, in the times of kings and queens of ancient and medieval India, there used to be beautiful maidens called vishakanyas on payroll of the kingdom . These females were given small micro doses of snake poison and other poisons right from their infancy, thus their body would produce protective protein antibodies to these toxins and despite the ladies carrying toxins in their body, they would not suffer any toxic effects. And these women were used by rulers to seduce enemy kings – the kings who fell for these ladies would suffer toxicity and fall ill or die.

Another stand-out case is that of typhoid Mary (Mary Mallon). This lady was a cook who migrated from Ireland to USA. She had an unusual immune make up. Typhoid Mary would not suffer typhoid although she was a carrier of the typhoid germ. Thus, people who ate the dishes cooked by her would inevitably suffer typhoid. She caused typhoid epidemics – authorities ultimately banned her to an island where she subsequently suffered paralysis leading to her slow death. Thus, immunity has been an interesting area of work from ancient times to the modern era of vaccines.

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