Extra Credit - Critical Thinking Topics (Full Vaccination Option).

 Five Surprising Moments in Vaccine History – The Washington Post

For the extra credit assignment on critical thinking, I chose the article “Five Surprising Moments in Vaccine History” published in The Washington Post in 2019 by Anna Rothschild. Anna Rothschild is a former on-air journalist for The Post covering science and health. She is an award-winning journalist, presenter, and multimedia producer. Most recently, she was the senior video producer at ABC’s FiveThirtyEight, and the host of Podcast-19: FiveThirtyEight on the Novel Coronavirus. She is also the creator, host, and animator of the popular YouTube channel Gross Science for NOVA and PBS Digital Studios, which is shown in educative classrooms and museums worldwide.

 

This article is composed of a short text and 3 videos. It talks about the importance of vaccines, how they are made, and what are its history. The purpose is to help the reader understand the context and science and answer big questions that currently worry parents and citizens, creating doubts about vaccines. In the short text, the author shares with the reader the most surprising facts about vaccines:

• Before vaccines, people used variolation to immunize.
• The anti-vaccination movement is old and started with the first vaccine that was developed in the late 1700s for smallpox.  
• Early vaccines were very crude but worked.
• Vaccines changed dramatically in the late 1800s. 

The first video talks about the anti-vaccine movement, which has existed for over two centuries and is mainly fueled by confusion about how vaccines work. Vaccine hesitancy started before people knew bacteria caused disease. What has prevailed through time is confusion and mistrust of public health institutions. Before vaccines, in Asia, there was a technique called Variolation, in which people made a small incision in the skin of an individual and put a drop of the virus. Although it sounds unclean and gross, it is a method that actually worked. The variolation method gave people a small case of the disease (in that case, smallpox) so people’s immune systems were able to develop the right antigen to fight it back. So, if the individual ever encountered smallpox again in the future, they would be protected. A lot of things that today we would regard unethical were done in the early 1800s because it was the only option people had to protect themselves from viruses. For example, Dr Edward Jenner, developed the first vaccine against smallpox, through an experiment with cowpox. It ended up being very effective. Vaccines are a way to educate your body on a disease without getting you sick, letting your immune system know how to defend itself. Since the beginning, there have been doubts and mistrust about vaccination, because it did not seem natural to insert an animal disease in a human body. It was also thought that vaccination went against God's will. However, people saw evidence of what the vaccine actually did. Smallpox had terrifying consequences and people’s response to fear was using the vaccine and seeing that it worked. Smallpox is the only human disease that has been eradicated due to the vaccine. When enough people in a community are vaccinated, infectious diseases cannot spread.

 

The second video talks about what are the ingredients of modern vaccines and why. Diphtheria is an example of a disease that today we do not worry about because of effective vaccination. Over time, the technology, and methods to create vaccines became better. In the 1890s a new treatment was developed called antitoxin. This was a very effective treatment but at the beginning wasn’t a vaccine. Eventually, scientists a toxoid for the disease, which enabled the creation of the vaccine. This is the method of how today's scientists develop a vaccine. They use toxoids or weak versions of germs to bring out an immune response and prepare our bodies for future encounters with the disease. Scientists found that if you could add some substances to these toxoids, the immune reaction would be better. Additives are sometimes what has created the most controversy. Some of the most common additives are aluminum, formaldehyde, and thimerosal. The amounts injected into our bodies are minimal, but there are many misconceptions and doubts about the effects these have on the body. However, there are no scientific facts to prove these do harm to the body and we also consume these additives in day-to-day products. The technology to create vaccines has changed and now scientists can make them without the virus or germ itself.

 

The third video talks about the sequence talk about how vaccines are tested for safety and the controversy around autism. The government created the Biologic Control Act to charge hygienic laboratories to control and overview vaccine production. This was the first step for vaccines to become highly tested and monitored as they are today. Today, the Food and drug administration is responsible for monitoring the vaccine creation and NIH is home to a vaccine research lab. Any new vaccine is first tested in animals before being tested in humans. After confirming no safety risk in animals, the human testing rounds start. These groups of people who are tested are volunteers. There are several rounds of people increment in the number of people, to test for safety. How large the testing group is depends on the disease. For this reason, vaccine testing is very different from any other drug testing. People have to be exposed to the virus to determine if the vaccine protected them or not. Then, after going through all these studies and determining whether the vaccine is safe, it is licensed. Another big preoccupation around vaccines has been the long-term effects. In order to determine those, scientists have observed and studied large groups of people who have been vaccinated to determine if there are any differences in their health. The rumors that vaccines cause autism started with a paper that was later retracted and included fraudulent data. Multiple institutions have looked into this and have not found a cause between autism and the measles vaccine. Only in the US, there are four systems in place to monitor vaccines: VSD, VAERS, CISA, and PRISM. For a vaccine to be licensed the risks of the vaccine have to be very rare compared to the possible risks of getting the disease.

 

After reading the article and listening to the short videos, I have a different perspective on vaccines. I really enjoyed the piece because it is very complete, transparent, and clear. The vaccination topic is one that has a lot of controversy around it, and in this article, all of the components are deeply analyzed and explained. I think one of the essential components was the use of facts as evidence to support every single claim. Secondly, in all three videos, we see Anna Rothschild interviewing experts from recognized institutions argument, which increases the trust and confidence in what they are saying. In the end, they are the experts who have dedicated their lives to vaccination and understanding germs and viruses. I think Anna Rothschild uses many elements of critical thinking to create her article. She uses facts to explain the arguments and she also exposes possible counterarguments to the issue and dismantles them. She gives a very complete and detailed narrative to expose the issue and is transparent about where she found her information. I have many takeaways from this article. First off, understanding vaccines, why and how were they created, their history, their ingredients, and the big problem surrounding them: misinformation. I learned the importance of not only our health but the community’s health to be vaccinated. Being vaccinated we can protect others who cannot (like pregnant women). It was very enriching and interesting to learn about this topic.