Hellow guys, Welcome to my website, and you are watching SNT 2 8 21 - Black History Month: The idea that led to vaccines. and this vIdeo is uploaded by Phyllis Ayman Associates at 2021-02-08T07:11:55-08:00. We are pramote this video only for entertainment and educational perpose only. So, I hop you like our website.
| Name | SNT 2 8 21 - Black History Month: The idea that led to vaccines |
| Video Uploader | Video From Phyllis Ayman Associates |
| Upload Date | This Video Uploaded At 08-02-2021 15:11:55 |
| Video Discription | When we think about the vaccine for COVID 19, we probably don’t think about how vaccines came about.Or maybe we identify vaccines with Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. But, in Black History Month it’s only fitting to know that the idea of a vaccine first originated with a slave who was renamed Onesimus by his slave owner. In 1706, this slave was purchased by the congregation of a New England minister named Cotton Mather and given to him as a gift. At the time, smallpox had been rampant back in Africa and was widespread on slave ships where people were packed in tight and unsanitary conditions that created an environment where the disease passed easily from person to person. Once the slave ships landed and the slaves were sold to the colonists the disease spread to them as well. The first slaves arrived in Massachusetts in 1638 which was the center of the early slave trade. The virus was extremely contagious, spreading like wildfire killing large numbers of people in its path. Smallpox patients experienced fever, fatigue and a crusty rash which left scars in about 30% of cases that could leave a person disfigured. It was also spread to Native Americans destroying communities that didn’t have immunity and were unable to fight off the virus. According to the writings of Minister Mather he didn’t trust Onesimus. But one day the slave told Minister Mather that he had had smallpox—and then hadn’t. Onesimus said that he “had undergone an operation, which had given him something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it...and whoever had the courage to use it was forever free of the fear of contagion.” Onesimus described the procedure of consisting of rubbing pus from an infected person into an open wound on the arm. Once the infected material was introduced into the body, the person who underwent the procedure was inoculated against smallpox. It wasn’t a vaccination, which involves exposure to a less dangerous virus to provoke immunity. But it did activate the recipient’s immune response and protected against the disease most of the time. Mather set out to confirm the information and found it had been used in Turkey and China. Mather tried spreading the word but Colonists rejected the procedure because it came from a black slave. As a result, Mather was the subject of what today we’d call terrorism and death threats. But in 1721, Mather and a physician in Boston named Zabdiel Boylston, for whom a well-known street in downtown Boston is named, began testing the procedure. That year, a smallpox epidemic spread from a slave ship to infecting about half of the residents of Boston. Boylston began by performing the procedure on his son and his slaves and from there inoculated other residents of Boston. In the end of he inoculated abot 242 people. Only about 1 in 40 people died. this was far less than the one in seven Boston residents who died who would not receive the inoculation.. The knowledge that Onesimus passed on to Minister Mather saved hundreds from what otherwise was a sure death. His knowledge led to the elimination of smallpox. In 1980 the World Health Organization declared smallpox entirely eradicated due to the spread of immunization worldwide. It remains the only infectious disease to have been entirely wiped out. So on this Black History month, when so many of us are seeking the vaccine for protection from COVID19, and especially vulnerable older adults, let us remember that the foundation for the vaccine came from an enslaved black man. |
| Category | News & Politics |
| Tags | black history month | black history | slaves | New England | slave ships | smallpox | vaccines | physician | World Health Organization | eradicate disease | COVID19 | COVID19vaccine | pandemic | vaccinations |
