• Question: What do you consider the most effective vaccine in the world?

    Asked by anon-256944 on 11 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Sabrina Slater

      Sabrina Slater answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      Hey Sofia, great question!
      The answer is a bit boring but VERY important – the most effective vaccine is the one that the most people take!
      Vaccines are only useful to eradicate viral infections when everyone is vaccinated and immune. The reason for this is because once a virus cannot infect anyone anymore, it stops spreading and dies off. Unfortunately, there will always be people who are unable to be vaccinated, for example, because they do not have a healthy immune system, because they are undergoing chemotherapy, because they are too young or because they are pregnant. There are also very selfish people who refuse to be vaccinated because they don’t “believe” in things the government tell them are good, or they don’t understand the importance of vaccines. So all these people have to rely on everyone else receiving the vaccine so that they stop spreading viral infections around! This is called “herd immunity”.

    • Photo: Alena Pance

      Alena Pance answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      Hi Sofia, there are many very good vaccines, that we all get when we are little, that have made some diseases ghosts from the past! but I think the most impressive one must be measles. It is almost eradicated by now and it is a horrid disease

    • Photo: Ellie Dunstone

      Ellie Dunstone answered on 12 Jun 2020:

      This is an interesting question! The ones that spring to mind are the smallpox vaccine, which helped eradicate smallpox completely – this is the only human disease that we have managed to completely get rid of and the vaccine was the major tool used to do this. However, this isn’t so much about the vaccine itself being effective, more that a lot of time and money was spent making sure that everyone who could be possibly infected actually TOOK the vaccine.
      The most effective vaccine in terms of its ability to induce immunity against the disease might be the yellow fever vaccine – most people develop immunity within ten days of having the vaccine, and 99 percent are immune within one month, and this immunity seems to last for an entire lifetime in all known cases!

    • Photo: Rachel Tanner

      Rachel Tanner answered on 22 Jun 2020:

      Hi Sofia, here are a few examples of very effective vaccines:
      – Smallpox (now totally eradicated)
      – Polio (there were 350,000 cases per year in 1988 vs. 104 cases in 2018)
      – Diphtheria (50,804 cases per year in 1941 vs. 1 case in 2014)
      – Pertussis (92,407 cases per year in 1956 vs. 3506 cases in 2014)
      – Measles (460,407 cases per year in 1967 and 130 cases in 2014)

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