How vaccines went from dull to world-beating
Over the past two years, many investors will have learned more about vaccines than they ever expected. Most people rarely encounter or think about them outside of our childhood immunisations and the occasional travel requirement. Yet as the pandemic has reminded us, this is a crucial, life-saving area of research – and suddenly a very profitable one for a select handful of successful vaccine developers.
Vaccines protect us from disease by stimulating the production of antibodies that prime the body’s immune system to protect us against specific diseases. They are prepared from the agent responsible for a disease to act as an antigen, but in a way that does not cause the disease. Vaccines can be used against both viral and bacterial diseases. Vaccines cannot guarantee you will never get a disease, but greatly reduce the probability of catching it. If you are infected, they will usually reduce the disease’s severity.
The first vaccine was developed in the UK by Edward Jenner in 1796. He realised milkmaids did not get smallpox because they had had cowpox. He inoculated a boy with cowpox virus and demonstrated the boy’s immunity to smallpox. A smallpox vaccine was developed in 1798 and mass vaccination throughout the 19th and 20th centuries enabled smallpox to be eliminated from the world by 1979.
The Covid-19 pandemic marks a fresh leap forward. Several highly effective vaccines were developed in just under a year, compared with the ten years or more required previously to
