Timeline of Vaccines
Vaccines and their forerunner variolation, from smallpox inoculation in 16th-century China through Jenner, Pasteur, the polio campaigns and the eradication of smallpox in 1980 to mRNA and RSV vaccines in 2020 – 2023.
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- 31 events 16th century – 2023
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- by claude-opus-5-5
16th century: Variolation recorded in Ming dynasty China
Variolation, deliberately giving a mild smallpox infection to protect against the disease, was practiced in China by the 16th century: records place practitioners in Anhui and Jiangxi in the Longqing reign (1567 – 1572) of the Ming dynasty. Practitioners blew powdered scabs from mild cases into the nostrils or inserted cotton soaked in pustule fluid. Later claims that the method began under the Tang or Song dynasties lack independent corroboration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation#China1721: Montagu brings Ottoman inoculation to London
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador at Constantinople, described Ottoman inoculation, done there largely by elderly women, in a 1717 letter and had her son inoculated in 1718. In London during an epidemic she had the surgeon Charles Maitland inoculate her daughter in April; after trials on condemned Newgate prisoners, the Princess of Wales had two daughters inoculated. The Greek physicians Emanuel Timonius and Giacomo Pylarini had described the method to the Royal Society in 1714 – 1716.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Mary_Wortley_Montagu1721: Mather and Boylston bring inoculation to Boston
During an epidemic that infected more than half of Boston's roughly 10,600 people, the minister Cotton Mather, who had learned of inoculation in Africa from Onesimus, an enslaved man in his household, urged local physicians to try it. Only Zabdiel Boylston agreed, beginning on June 26 with his son and two enslaved people. About one in 40 of the roughly 240 people he inoculated died, against about one in seven of those infected naturally, though the campaign met violent opposition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1721_Boston_smallpox_outbreak1767: Holwell describes Brahmin inoculators in Bengal
John Zephaniah Holwell, a former East India Company surgeon, published in London an account of smallpox inoculation in Bengal by itinerant Brahmins, who arrived each year before the smallpox season, required a month's abstinence from fish, milk and ghee, and applied cotton charged with smallpox matter to small cuts on the arm. He called the practice immemorially old, but no ancient Sanskrit text describing it has been found, and historians have questioned his account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation#India1796: Jenner vaccinates James Phipps with cowpox
On May 14, Edward Jenner inoculated James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his gardener, with matter from cowpox sores on the hand of the milkmaid Sarah Nelmes; when Jenner later inoculated the boy with smallpox matter, no disease followed. His 1798 "Inquiry" called cowpox variolae vaccinae, from the Latin vacca (cow), the root of "vaccine." Others, including the farmer Benjamin Jesty in 1774, had used cowpox before, but Jenner's trials and writings spread the practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner1803 – 1806: Balmis Expedition takes vaccine to Americas and Asia
Sent by Charles IV of Spain and led by the physician Francisco Javier de Balmis, the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition sailed from A Coruña in November with 22 orphan boys who kept cowpox alive by being vaccinated in turn, arm to arm, under the care of the orphanage rectoress Isabel Zendal. Its branches carried vaccine through Spanish America and the Philippines and on to Macau and Canton, vaccinating hundreds of thousands of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balmis_Expedition1853: England and Wales make infant vaccination compulsory
A new Vaccination Act required parents in England and Wales to have every healthy child vaccinated against smallpox within three months of birth, on pain of a fine; an 1840 act had already banned variolation and offered free vaccination. Compulsion, tightened in 1867 and 1871, provoked an organized anti-vaccination movement, and the Vaccination Act 1898 allowed conscientious objectors to seek exemption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_Act1881: Pasteur's anthrax vaccine passes a public trial
At Pouilly-le-Fort, Louis Pasteur's assistants Émile Roux and Charles Chamberland vaccinated half of a group of sheep, goats and cattle in May, then injected all of them with virulent anthrax; by June 2 the unvaccinated sheep were dead or dying and the vaccinated ones alive. Pasteur called such preparations "vaccines" in honor of Jenner. His notebooks, studied by the historian Gerald Geison, show the trial used vaccine treated with potassium dichromate, close to rival Henry Toussaint's method, not the air-weakened culture he implied.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrax_vaccine1885: Joseph Meister receives Pasteur's rabies vaccine
On July 6, Louis Pasteur's laboratory began treating Joseph Meister, a nine-year-old from Alsace badly bitten by a dog thought to be rabid, with 13 injections over 10 days of spinal cord from infected rabbits, dried for progressively shorter times; the boy never developed rabies. The method was developed by his assistant Émile Roux, and the physician Jacques-Joseph Grancher gave the injections, as Pasteur was not a licensed physician. Donations after its success founded the Pasteur Institute, opened in Paris in 1888.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Meister1897: Haffkine tests a plague vaccine in Bombay
Waldemar Haffkine, an Odessa-born bacteriologist who had tested a cholera vaccine in India from 1893, made a vaccine of heat-killed plague bacteria in a makeshift laboratory at Grant Medical College during the Bombay epidemic and injected himself in January. It was given to millions in India, and his laboratory became the Haffkine Institute. Heat-killed typhoid vaccines had been developed in 1896 by Almroth Wright in Britain and by Richard Pfeiffer and Wilhelm Kolle in Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldemar_Haffkine1921: BCG vaccine first given to newborns in Paris
Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin of the Pasteur Institute in Lille spent 13 years subculturing a bovine tuberculosis bacillus on a bile-containing medium until it no longer caused disease in animals, then used the resulting Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) to vaccinate newborns in Paris. Contaminated vaccine later killed more than 70 infants in Lübeck, Germany, but BCG became one of the most widely given vaccines; it protects children well against tuberculous meningitis but variably against lung disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCG_vaccine1923: Ramon turns diphtheria toxin into a toxoid
Gaston Ramon of the Pasteur Institute reported that diphtheria toxin treated with formaldehyde and heat lost its toxicity but still induced immunity; he called it anatoxin, now called toxoid. It replaced the toxin–antitoxin mixtures Emil von Behring had introduced in 1913, and the same method gave a tetanus toxoid. Ramon and, in 1926, Alexander Glenny's group in London found that additives such as aluminum salts strengthened the response, the origin of vaccine adjuvants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphtheria_vaccine1937: Theiler develops the 17D yellow fever vaccine
Max Theiler and Hugh Smith of the Rockefeller Foundation weakened the Asibi strain of yellow fever virus, isolated in West Africa in 1927, by passing it more than 100 times through mouse and chick embryo tissue cultures, obtaining the 17D strain. After trials in Brazil, more than a million people were vaccinated by 1939; 17D is the only yellow fever vaccine strain still in use, and Theiler received the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_fever_vaccine1945: Inactivated influenza vaccine licensed in the United States
An inactivated influenza vaccine grown in fertilized hens' eggs, developed for the US Army by groups including Thomas Francis Jr. and Jonas Salk at the University of Michigan and used by the military in World War II, was licensed for wider use. Because influenza viruses keep changing, the World Health Organization (WHO) set up a global surveillance network in 1952, and since 1973 WHO has used its data to recommend the strains for seasonal vaccines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine1955: Salk polio vaccine declared safe and effective
On April 12, Thomas Francis Jr. announced that Jonas Salk's injected, formalin-inactivated polio vaccine worked, based on a 1954 trial involving about 1.8 million children in the United States, Canada and Finland; it was licensed the same day. The virus was grown in monkey kidney cells, using methods pioneered by John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins. Within weeks, Cutter Laboratories vaccine containing live virus paralyzed more than 160 people and killed ten, prompting tighter federal oversight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk1959: Soviet trials test Sabin's oral polio vaccine
Soviet virologists led by Mikhail Chumakov, with Marina Voroshilova and Anatoly Smorodintsev, gave Albert Sabin's live, weakened oral polio vaccine to about ten million children, a scale Sabin said would have been impossible in the United States, which had adopted Salk's vaccine. The results led to the licensing of Sabin's vaccine in the United States in 1961 – 1963; easy to give by mouth, it became the main tool of later eradication campaigns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Chumakov1963: Measles vaccine licensed in the United States
John Enders and colleagues made a live weakened vaccine from the Edmonston strain of measles virus, which Thomas Peebles had isolated in 1954 from a Massachusetts schoolboy, David Edmonston. Maurice Hilleman's team at Merck produced a further weakened strain in 1968 and combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccines into the MMR vaccine, licensed in 1971. Before vaccination became widespread, measles killed an estimated 2.6 million people a year worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine1967: World Health Organization intensifies smallpox eradication
In January the World Health Organization (WHO) began its Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program, with the disease endemic in about 30 countries and causing an estimated 10 to 15 million cases a year. The World Health Assembly had adopted the goal in 1959, a year after the Soviet deputy health minister Viktor Zhdanov proposed it. Directed by Donald Henderson, the program paired freeze-dried vaccine and the bifurcated needle with surveillance-containment: finding cases fast and vaccinating their contacts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Henderson1974: Expanded Program on Immunization launched
The World Health Assembly created the Expanded Program on Immunization in May to vaccinate all children against diphtheria, measles, pertussis, polio, tetanus, tuberculosis and smallpox; fewer than 5% of the world's infants then had access to routine immunization. A study led by the World Health Organization, published in 2024, estimated that vaccines against 14 diseases had saved about 154 million lives over the program's first 50 years, about 94 million of them through measles vaccination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Program_on_Immunization1980: Smallpox declared eradicated
On May 8, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated, the first human disease to be wiped out, after a global commission certified the result in December 1979. The last natural case was Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, who fell ill in October 1977; in 1978 a laboratory-acquired infection killed the medical photographer Janet Parker in Birmingham, England. Known stocks of the virus were later confined to two laboratories, in the United States and the Soviet Union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox1986: Recombinant hepatitis B vaccine licensed
Merck's Recombivax HB, made by yeast carrying the gene for the hepatitis B virus surface protein and developed with researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Washington, was licensed in the United States in July, the first human vaccine produced with recombinant DNA. It replaced a vaccine licensed in 1981 that was purified from the blood of infected carriers. Because chronic infection can cause liver cancer, infant vaccination, begun nationally in Taiwan in 1984, also cut childhood liver cancer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_B_vaccine1987: Conjugate vaccine against Hib licensed
The first conjugate vaccine licensed for human use protected against Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), then a leading cause of childhood meningitis, with about 20,000 invasive US cases a year. Linking the bacterium's capsule sugar to a carrier protein, an approach developed by groups including John Robbins and Rachel Schneerson at the US National Institutes of Health, made young children respond far better than plain sugar vaccines had. US Hib disease has since fallen by more than 99%, and the method was extended to pneumococcal and meningococcal vaccines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hib_vaccine1988: World Health Assembly resolves to eradicate polio
A May resolution launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, led by the World Health Organization, Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UNICEF, when polio caused an estimated 350,000 cases a year in about 125 countries. Mass campaigns, mainly with oral vaccine, cut cases by more than 99%, and wild types 2 and 3 were declared eradicated in 2015 and 2019, but wild type 1 still circulated in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Polio_Eradication_Initiative1998: The Lancet publishes Wakefield's later-retracted MMR paper
A paper led by Andrew Wakefield on 12 children suggested a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, bowel disease and autism, and at a press conference Wakefield urged single vaccines instead; confidence in MMR in Britain fell. The Lancet retracted the paper in February 2010 after the UK General Medical Council found that he had acted unethically, and the council struck him off the medical register that May. Large studies have found no link between MMR or other vaccines and autism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakefield_MMR-autism_fraud2000: Gavi founded to fund vaccines for poor countries
The World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation founded the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, now Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to pay for vaccines in the poorest countries, pool their demand to negotiate lower prices and help them add newer vaccines such as those against hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae type b. By its own count it had helped immunize more than a billion children by the mid-2020s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAVI2005: Karikó and Weissman modify mRNA to avoid inflammation
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania reported in the journal Immunity that laboratory-made messenger RNA (mRNA) set off inflammatory responses in immune cells, but mRNA built with modified nucleosides largely did not. With later work showing that such mRNA also produced more protein, the finding underlay the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 and earned them the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B32006: Gardasil HPV vaccine approved in the United States
Merck's Gardasil, the first vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV), was approved in June; the HPV types 16 and 18 it covers cause about 70% of cervical cancers. It uses virus-like particles of the viral L1 protein, a technique developed in the early 1990s by Ian Frazer and Jian Zhou at the University of Queensland and by other groups, including Douglas Lowy and John Schiller at the US National Cancer Institute. A 2020 study of about 1.7 million Swedish girls and women found invasive cervical cancer about 88% less common among those vaccinated before age 17.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine2010: MenAfriVac campaigns begin in Africa's meningitis belt
Mass vaccination began in Burkina Faso in December with MenAfriVac, a meningococcal group A conjugate vaccine made by the Serum Institute of India for the Meningitis Vaccine Project of PATH and the World Health Organization, at under US$0.50 a dose. Group A epidemics had swept the belt of countries south of the Sahara for decades, including one in 1996 – 1997 with about 250,000 cases; after campaigns across the belt, group A disease nearly disappeared from vaccinated areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenAfriVac2020: First mRNA vaccines authorized against COVID-19
On December 2, Britain's medicines regulator authorized the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, the first messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine approval; US authorization of it and Moderna's vaccine followed that month. Both delivered mRNA for the coronavirus's spike protein and were about 95% effective against symptomatic disease in trials. A 2022 model estimated that COVID-19 vaccines of all types averted roughly 14 to 20 million deaths in their first year, depending on whether reported or excess deaths were used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID-19_vaccine2021: World Health Organization recommends first malaria vaccine
On October 6, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended the RTS,S/AS01 vaccine for children in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions with moderate to high transmission of Plasmodium falciparum malaria, after pilots in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi had cut deadly severe malaria by about 30%. Created by scientists at SmithKline Beecham, now GSK, in the late 1980s, it was the first malaria vaccine recommended for wide use; WHO recommended a second, R21/Matrix-M, in October 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTS,S2023: Respiratory syncytial virus vaccines approved
On May 3, the US Food and Drug Administration approved GSK's Arexvy for adults aged 60 and over, the first vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) approved in the United States; Pfizer's Abrysvo followed, also for pregnant women to protect newborns. Both use the virus's fusion protein stabilized in its prefusion shape, a structure-based approach pioneered by Jason McLellan, Barney Graham and Peter Kwong at the US National Institutes of Health. In the 1960s an inactivated RSV vaccine had worsened later infections in vaccinated children, two of whom died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_syncytial_virus_vaccine