Instead, Foege’s passing registered the way the deaths of many public health giants do: as a quiet tremor among the people who know what they did, and a barely-noticed headline for the rest of us. A thousand years ago, people in Asia were practicing a kind of vaccination-lite called variolation, deliberately infecting people with a mild case of the disease to guarantee immunity, though the process came with the risk of developing severe smallpox. And smallpox was the first disease to have a formal vaccine: in 1796 the British doctor Edward Jenner developed what he would call a vaccine from cowpox, a very mild version of the disease found in cows, which had the benefits of variolation without the risks.
Author: Bryan Walsh
Published at: 2026-02-02 21:09:23
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