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Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest DiseasesIt's looking a lot like 2008 is going to be the year of the vaccine in our house. It's a topic that is occupying an ever increasing amount of our free time talking about and researching. So far this book has been absolutely fascinating and I'm finding it hard to fall asleep at night reading it because I just want to keep turning the pages. Vaccinated focuses loosely on the story of Maurice Hilleman the Merck scientist who was instrumental in creating 8 of the 12 vaccines that are part of the routine childhood schedule as of 2007. I met Maurice briefly while I worked at Merck back in 1998-99 and unfortunately didn't have nearly an understanding or appreciation for his life's work. If I had it probably would have been impossible to restrain myself from thanking him every time I passed him in the halls (which was several times a day).The book is answering a lot of the very specific questions that I wanted to know about: what were the conditions leading up to the development of the vaccines, what was the background for using the different development processes or cell lines. It also talks a lot about the conditions and restraints that these scientists worked under. I get the impression that there was a remarkable level of cooperation between different companies at this time. These vaccine preventable illnesses were perceived by most as a huge threat and they worked together in different labs purifying and improving on other people's work and then several companies would produce enough vaccine to meet the demand if it was pressing. Their research in a lot of ways was groundbreaking in helping define the ethical treatment of patients in clinical trials but not for the reasons you might expect. There was so little back in the 1960s & 70s in terms of research guidelines for how trials should be performed. These vaccines were tested on fellow researchers, their families, members of the company and in many cases on students in schools for the mentally retarded. I'm sure that many vaccine opponents could read this book and be fueled with a litany of complaints against the scientists doing this research but I think they'd be missing the point. These researchers were not only pioneers in virology and microbiology but also in the standards that their own products (the vaccines) had to meet before these scientists felt comfortable producing them for the public. Indeed there are many anecdotes in this book that describe Hilleman and other vaccine developers refusing to produce their vaccines despite heavy pressure from government and regulatory groups because they were not yet happy with the safety of their own work. Only when they were satisfied of the vaccine's safety would they then agree to begin production even in the face of threatening illnesses. Posted on Thu Jan 3rd, 2008 08:08 PM | ||
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