Code Orange

Mitty works on his paper at home, and his parents are delighted at the change in Mitty; he is actually doing schoolwork. Surrounded by his books, he writes about the smallpox vaccine. Vaccines were developed when people realized that if someone survived smallpox, that person would not contract the disease again. In 1796, Edward Jenner noticed that dairy maids also had some sort of immunity, since they didn’t get smallpox, either. They received immunity from exposure to a milder form of the disease, cow pox. Jenner experimented on a boy, James Phipps, by cutting open his arm and exposing him to cow pox. Phipps got sick, but his illness wasn’t deadly. Jenner cut his Phipps’s open again, and this time exposed him to smallpox. (Mitty says that such actions today that would be “grounds for a lawsuit” [45]). Phipps didn’t become sick, so Jenner had just discovered the world’s first vaccine. (The word “vaccination” comes from the Latin for cow, “vaccus.”)

The next step is to persuade people to be vaccinated. But some people are afraid, while others never hear of vaccinations. So, smallpox outbreaks continue. Mitty adds that there are people today who refuse all vaccinations, sometimes out of fear as well.