How We Wiped Out a Deadly Virus

When was the last time you heard anything about smallpox? Let's be perfectly honest, it was probably in a movie. I think the 2018 Mission Impossible Fallout had smallpox as a driving feature there. The point is that this is a real-world bad guy that has been relegated to the realms of Hollywood, and that's very important. You see, before the smallpox vaccine was developed, it was killing about two million people a year, and we have eradicated it. Smallpox only exists in a couple of research labs, one in the US, one in Russia. There are no other reservoirs, stores of smallpox. You cannot get smallpox. It is a public health miracle. It's not because science dealt with it, but the point is it's at that level. That's how many lives it has saved. Now, let's take the measles virus, which is very similar to smallpox in many ways, and we wind back to the 1950s before we had a vaccine. Again, this was a virus that was killing approximately two million people a year worldwide. These are massive numbers, and the measles vaccine has helped us reduce down so that deaths from measles are incredibly rare. In the UK, there was one death from measles last year, and that is because of vaccines. This is very, very important because the vaccine doesn't just prevent you from getting it, it prevents you potentially spreading it to other people because the vaccine protects the other people around you, meaning that somebody who can't be vaccinated or for whom the vaccine hasn't worked can't catch it from them. You're essentially continually breaking the chains, and that's why, in my opinion, one of the reasons why we've got such an issue with the vaccine measles uptake going down is that not only does it mean that some people are more at risk of measles, there are clusters of measles outbreaks that are occurring in the UK, but it also means that that breaking of the chain no longer happens. Now, vaccines are astounding. It's thought that about the 14 pathogens we have vaccines for, since their initial development, they've saved nearly 200 million lives. There's an estimate that says that vaccines have saved six lives every minute. That is how important these things are. Now, let me spin back to smallpox, which we eradicated. We could do the same with measles, i.e. we have the vaccines, we clear the decks, we get rid of the pools of measles, we make sure that everybody is covered, and that's it. All done. We don't need the vaccine anymore because we have killed the virus. If the virus no longer exists, it can't infect anybody. So yes, vaccines are very, very important for people now. Vaccines save lives now. But vaccines potentially have the ability to make themselves redundant. We could potentially cure the world from measles in the same way that we did smallpox. So think about that. The vaccine that you take to protect yourself from measles is not necessarily just about you. But potentially about your children's children's children. Because we could knock this one on the head.