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Attenuate. Verb. /əˈtenyəˌwāt/ reduce the force, effect, or value of.
An attenuated vaccine is one that has been reduced in force enough to not get you sick, but still gives your immune system schooling on how to fight it. The first ones were created by the guy whose name appears on your milk. Even that almond bullshit.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 6, 1885--
Three of Louis’s five kids died of typhoid; I expect he wasn’t a fan of infectious diseases. Although the concept of germ theory had been around for centuries, Pasteur’s work with milk gave it strong support and helped nail the coffin shut on “miasma theory,” which is disease ghosts in the air or some shit.
While working on a cure for chicken cholera in 1878, Pasteur tried injecting fresh bacteria cultures into chickens to give them immunity, but it killed a lot of them; the vaccine was as bad as the disease. Then there was a happy accident. Pasteur said to his assistant, “Be sure to inject those chickens with fresh cultures before you go on vacation.” The assistant said, “Sure thing boss.” But the assistant forgot and came back a month later and was all “Fucking hell I’m in so much trouble,” and injected the chickens with the cultures that had been sitting out for a month.
The chickens didn’t die, and were also immune. Eureka.
Then Pasteur killed the wabbit. Many wabbits. Pasteur gave rabies to rabbits, then harvested their spinal cords and dried them out to weaken the virus. Joseph Meister was a nine-year-old boy who’d been badly mauled by a rabid dog and was certain to die. But on July 6, 1885, Pasteur injected him with the attenuated rabies vaccine he’d taken from the bunnies. It wasn’t just a “Fuck it, let’s see what happens.” It had already been successfully tested on dozens of dogs. Over the next 11 days he gave the boy 13 progressively stronger inoculations (made stronger by drying them for a shorter time). The boy lived. Good thing, too. Because Pasteur was not a doctor and would have been in deep shit if the kid died. Instead, he became a hero.
Later analysis of Pasteur’s notebooks revealed that prior to Joseph, Pasteur had treated two others for rabies. One survived but might not have had rabies. The other died. Of rabies. Anyway, the successful treatment of young Joseph paved the way for the development of many other vaccines.
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Vaccines nowadays are a heap of a lot safer than those even 50 years ago.
Rabies vaccines used to be made with animal nervous system tissues, because that's what the virus lives in. Some unlucky folks develop an autoimmune response to their own nerve tissue because sometimes the immune system learns the wrong lesson, so to speak. Similarly, the smallpox vaccine is a live-virus vaccine made from the related Vaccinia virus. There were some major side effects and deaths associated with Vaccinia infection in some unfortunate few, but that was massively dwarfed by the many lives saved from eradicating smallpox.
Public health is ALWAYS a balancing act between bad outcomes. I wish people appreciated how much more careful and stringent we are now, and just how astonishingly effective and safe the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are in a historical context.