Thoughts on the Covid Vaccines

"I am going to tell you a thing, that will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless. . . ." Lady Mary Wortley Montague, writing to a friend in England from Istanbul (then Constantinople) in 1717

Bear with me. My historical romance writer roots are showing today. One of the things I loved most about writing more than 30 novels for several NY publishing houses was doing the research. I never used the story of Lady Mary in any of my books, but I was fascinated by her courage and curiosity and now, during the time of Covid, she's popped back into my mind. 

During her lifetime, small-pox ravaged the population of Europe, killing as many as one in four who contracted it and leaving most of its sufferers with disfiguring scars and mottled skin. Mary caught it and her once flawless face was pock-marked and her eyes red-rimmed. But she didn't let it dampen her spirits. She was an adventuress and a prolific writer about her travels to exotic places with her ambassador husband. 

When they were in Constantinople, she discovered that certain old women would organize parties where they opened the veins of those who were willing, and inserted some matter from small pox on the head of a needle. Then they bound up the wound, covering it with a little nutshell. From that point on, the person would be safe from smallpox. Lady Mary had witnessed an early form of inoculation.

Without her husband's knowledge, she had her three year old son vaccinated in this manner and he never contracted the deadly disease. Later, she did the same for her daughter born in England who also thrived and achieved immunity to small pox, the scourge that actually killed more people than the Black Death. 

Of course, the British medical community was skeptical of the practice, likely because it was suggested by a woman, came from a "non-Christian" land, and would deprive them of the profits to be made from useless treatment of small-pox sufferers. But in 1796, when Edward Jenner substituted the less virulent "cow-pox" for the real pox and showed the disease could be guarded against, the practice of using vaccines gained widespread acceptance. 

More than two hundreds years of vaccinations for a multitude of diseases have shown that vaccines work. 

"But wait!" I hear some of you saying. "What about the whole mRNA deal? Isn't this the first time this sort of vaccine has been used in human beings?"

Yes, but the use of messenger RNA began in 1985 in the work of another visionary woman, Dr. Katalin Kariko. So more than thirty-five years of research have gone into this step forward in immunology. And I'm intensely thankful. Because of my suppressed immune system, I can't take live virus inoculations like the ones Lady Mary brought to England. Moderna and Pfizer's shots are a Godsend for folks like me. 

To that end, I have received a booster because my health issues qualify me for a 3rd Moderna shot. I have experienced mild injection site pain and redness that has lasted for a little over a week, but no other side effects. I'll be boarding the Norwegian Encore in 29 days. Thanks to the booster, my immune system is busy packing its bags to protect me. 

If you haven't yet received the vaccine for Covid-19, let me leave you with a final thought. Small pox has been virtually wiped from the earth. There hasn't been a reported case of it since the 70's. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could say the same for Covid-19 and all its variants? 

The only way to get there is for everyone who can accept a vaccine to do so.