The difficulties posed by vaccination campaigns are sometimes similar from one century to another.
At the end of 2020, we had to equip ourselves with freezers capable of keeping the RNA vaccines against Covid at very low temperatures.
Two centuries earlier, the Kingdom of Spain was faced with a similar challenge: how to protect the brand new smallpox vaccine during its transport to the Spanish possessions in America and Asia?
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These diseases that have killed well over 100,000 people in France
In March 1803, the King of Spain, worried about the ravages of smallpox,
"ordered the Council of the Indies to study the possibility of introducing the vaccine into the colonies"
, tells the American historian Michael Smith in the
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
.
Smallpox is a dreadful disease that kills at least 30% of its victims, but Briton Edward Jenner has just developed the very first vaccine in history: by injecting healthy patients with pus taken from peasant women infected with the disease. Beef pox, Jenner protects them
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