TWTYTW*

What a year.  Looking back, the (relative) optimism of my New Year’s Eve 2020 blip was short-lived.

2021 has been a year of heroes and villains.  I won’t give the bad guys (and gals) anymore airtime than they’ve already had.  I want to end the year on a positive note.  This is a time to celebrate the good.  The fact that most of us are still here is down to them.  Besides which, your list of baddies may well be very different from mine. 

So this is personal view. And it’s the subject of my blip because I’ve managed to reach the end of this year without catching the disease which has taken so many other people.  I’m one of the lucky ones. And I don’t want to forget that fact.

It’s taken less than 2 years from the world waking up to Covid-19 to developing and distributing a vaccine to combat the disease.  To put this in context, it’s taken almost 40 years to produce an HIV vaccine.

My heroes are the multi-disciplinary teams of doctors, engineers and mathematicians who grappled with the science to produce the vaccines and the health-care workers who made sure we got them.  Not forgetting the thousands of volunteers who stood outside vaccination centres in the cold and the rain (and the sunny days too) keeping us in orderly queues.

But the real hero of this story, for me, is 8-year old James Phipps.  

In 1796 James allowed a local doctor, Edward Jenner, to innoculate him with the pus of cowpox scrapped from the arm of milkmaid Sarah Nelmes.  Sarah had caught the disease from Blossom the cow.  Now Jenner didn’t just do this for fun - he (and others) had noticed that milkmaids seemed to be immune to small-pox after catching cow-pox.  

After James had recovered from a mild case of cowpox, Jenner innoculated him again, this time with small-pox.  I’d really liked to know what James was thinking and feeling at this stage.  As it turns out - nothing.  He’d become immune to small pox.  

It takes a while for the scientific world to catch up, but this is really the point where vaccination takes off.  The part of Blossom the cow in all this has not been forgotten either.  Her hide has been preserved and apparently hangs on the wall of the St Georges Medical School library in Tooting.

I hope you and yours stay safe in the coming year.  


* That Was The Year That Was