It's a profound understatement to say we live in a time of uncertainty and skepticism toward major American institutions. Into that environment, we are introducing new vaccines designed to combat a viral pandemic killing nearly 4,000 of Americans every day.
Is there any wonder, then, that so many myths and rumors circulate about the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines? It's reasonable from human experience to be concerned about having a stranger stick you with a sharp object and inject a foreign substance into your body.
I write to provide some perspective and advice as a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
First, some history. Raging infectious smallpox outbreaks killed nearly 400,000 people each year in Europe during the 1700s, until physicians noticed that milkmaids who had been infected with cowpox seemed to be immune to the outbreaks.
English physician Edward Jenner's first inoculation in 1796 was crude by today's standards — he took the pus from a milkmaid's cowpox blister and inoculated a young boy who then developed immunity to the smallpox outbreak in his town.
Today, our methods and labs are much more hygienic and careful. The requirements for testing the safety and effectiveness of vaccines involve a range of steps and reviews before final approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And that leads to the first question:
Have these vaccines been adequately studied for side effects? They were developed so quickly.
We've developed a lot of scientific knowledge in the 225 years since Jenner's first vaccine. A wise former mentor of mine, Dr. Paul Offit, once told me, "All the vaccines that are easy to make have been made already. All of the ones left are the hard ones."
Included in the hard ones are vaccines for coronaviruses, which have been around for a long time in various forms and required a new technology to confer immunity.