There's no vaccine that assures concern for community

By Monica Hesse / The Washington Post

The simplified, somewhat apocryphal story I was taught about the origins of vaccines is this one: In 1796, at the height of the smallpox epidemic, physician Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, a related but milder illness, appeared to be immune to the more severe disease, which killed 30 percent of the people who caught it. Jenner took a cowpox sample from an infected milkmaid and injected it into the arm of a willing subject, and the subject became immune, and smallpox became eradicated, and we never looked back.

What I didn’t learn until recently is that the subject was an 8-year-old boy. His name was James Phipps, and he was the son of Jenner’s gardener. Only a small amount is known about Phipps’s life, pre- or postvaccination, but can you imagine what it would have felt like to be his parents? To volunteer your son for a new procedure, which at the time must have sounded like, “Good morrow, I would like to slice open your son’s arm and shoot in some pus. The pus is infected!”

Two centuries later, it’s hard to know how much their volunteering was the spirit of altruism vs. the reality of financial dependence — we’ve got some real issues of ethics and classism wrapped up in this medical tale — but it’s probably safe to say that their fear of smallpox outweighed their fear of the unknown. And so, a few days ago, when I held my 4-year-old daughter in my lap as a nurse prepared her annual boosters, I found myself thanking the Phipps family for how much they had been willing to risk so that we could risk barely anything at all.

One of my daughter’s boosters was the MMRV vaccine, the one preventing measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox. She got the shot and a bandage; her most serious side effect was missing pool day with her preschool class. And then I woke up the next morning and saw a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that measles cases had reached their highest level in 33 years.

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