Vaccines: the Science that Saved Billions & How We Stopped Trusting it
- Kevin Lankes
- Mar 11
- 15 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UNsZKDa_Ea0
There was a time when getting a shot was perfunctory and not at all controversial, and in fact, it was just a routine thing people did because they understood the benefits of not dying from preventable illnesses. And the government in those days was pretty cool about promoting the public health and they mostly set things up so that all these essential vaccines were free.
But then somewhere along the line, the whole attitude toward vaccines and vaccine science really went off the rails. There’s a measles outbreak in Texas as of this filming, and a couple of cases here in New York City, and this is a disease that was completely eradicated in the U.S. by the year 2000. Oops.
This episode is all about the history of vaccine science and how vaccination came about in the first place. We’ll also cover how the anti-vax movement began and why it’s a growing trend today. I’ll uncover in detail the actual science behind vaccines and what it says, and I’ll talk about the anti-vaxxer claims and whether or not they have any basis in factual reality. Now I’ve been boxing and doing mixed martial arts since I was seven years old, so you can totally trust me when I talk about jabs.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for this deep dive into how we’re all about to get those super fun end game messages from the Oregon Trail that let us know that we have died of dysentery.
First thing’s first, please like and subscribe because this video could very possibly lose me every single one of my dozens of subscribers. Maybe I’ll replace them with a different dozen or two if people find this who are into things like critical thinking.
I’m going to ask that you come at this with a skeptical mind. Not an open mind, mind you, but one of a skeptical and curious nature. We’re going to go into the actual no-bullshit facts about vaccines. Try not to reflexively comment below that I’m part of the deep state or taking money from the imaginary vaccine fairy, just put all that absolute batshit conspiratorial thinking aside for a few minutes and engage with actual evidence, things that are actually provably true about vaccines. Stick with me on this, it might just turn things around for you or someone you care about, and it might just save lives. That’s what we all want -- for the people in our lives to be happy and healthy. With that, let’s dive in.
Vaccination was a theorized and sought after medical treatment going back thousands of years. It’s possible that the first vaccination attempts were made in the year 202 BCE. But in more recent documented premodern history, smallpox was the big bad of the viral pantheon that countless nations and healthcare workers were trying unsuccessfully to treat. For at least three thousand, five hundred years, smallpox had ravaged entire populations wherever it popped up. And each time it did, smallpox killed 30% of the people it infected.
Aristocrat, writer, and medical pioneer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had witnessed a procedure on her travels through the Ottoman Empire and when she got back home to England in 1721, she requested that it be performed on her daughters, effectively introducing an early form of vaccination into British medicine. What she’d seen there in modern-day Turkey was an inoculation attempt against smallpox using the virus itself in the hopes that the body would be able to build defenses against it. This practice of taking infected material from a sick person and implanting it into a healthy person was called variolation, and it had actually been occurring across the globe for a long time, and it did work sometimes, but it wasn’t perfect and people still got sick and they still died.
In 1774, Benjamin Jesty had an enormous breakthrough. He noticed that milk maids were not contracting smallpox at the same rate as the general population, and he discovered that their infection from the much less serious cowpox had given them immunity against the much more dangerous smallpox.
In 1796, Edward Jenner connected these dots, though it wasn’t exclusively his idea and he was most certainly inspired by a lot of other work being performed around him at the same time, but he’s credited as the inventor of the world’s first smallpox vaccine. He took material from a milk maid’s infected cowpox lesion, which is, yes, a very gross thing to say out loud, and, even grosser still, he injected it into eight-year-old James Phipps. Two months later, Jenner injected Phipps with actual smallpox and Phipps did not get sick. He was totally fine, and this was just a miraculous development. But I personally think maybe Phipps’s parents should have switched primary care providers. If my doctor is just going around injecting kids with smallpox, I think I’m bailing. Maybe making a phone call or two, while I’m at it.
Somewhere around the year 1800 either in France or possibly by Jenner himself, the word “vaccine” was coined from the root word vacca, which is Latin for cow. Or vacca with a hard v, if ecclesiastical Latin is more your thing.
President Thomas Jefferson declared smallpox vaccination to be a national health priority, and even sent vaccine samples with Lewis and Clark on their famed expedition. Similarly in Europe, Emperor Napoleon got behind vaccination in a big way too. It’s really no surprise just how quickly treatments for virulent diseases are accepted and incorporated into societies that see in real-time the absolute horrors and devastation these germs can leave in their wake. At the time, vaccination was an absolute miracle. But it wasn’t a perfectly packaged medical technology yet, because we didn’t fully understand the underlying mechanisms and the germ theory of disease hadn’t been solidified yet, so the results hadn’t been replicated for other viral illnesses. Before this, in the western world, one of the prominent theories of disease centered around miasma, or bad air or smells, that were said to make people sick.
In the 1870s, Louis Pasteur, who is the namesake behind pasteurization and who’s credited with the discovery that microbial life was responsible for disease and also fermentation -- he used this newfound knowledge to work up a new vaccine completely in the laboratory. It was for a disease called fowl or avian cholera that still affects our livestock industry today because Pasteur didn’t actually succeed in making his vaccine.
But what he did do for us is super important, especially for all of us who like to eat and drink things without dying. Pasteur was summoned to France by Napoleon III to fix his inability to indulge in his alcoholism. His wine was going bad in storage and he didn’t know how to stop it. Using the information Pasteur had discovered about microbial life, he invented the process of pasteurization and saved the entirety of French culture. Then he went on to fix the beer brewing process and saved the rest of the world, too.
In the 1880s, Pasteur invented a vaccine for rabies, which brought him international fame. I had the rabies vaccine a few years ago so all I have to say about that is, thanks buddy. Pasteur also made numerous other contributions to medical microbiology that would take us off topic, but he’s a super important figure in modern science.
When Pasteur was working on the rabies vaccine, he actually unknowingly invented a second class of vaccines. He would later look back on his own work and as things began to click he realized that virulence, or the severity of infectiousness of a disease, was not a constant state. It was something that rose or fell based on specific conditions. When he made the rabies vaccine, he’d used intracerebral injections from the dried spinal material of rabbits, which altered the virus into a weakened state. This new attenuated virus, as it’s called today, makes a perfect vaccine because it’s still able to create an immune response in the body and teach it to make antibodies without actually getting you sick. Attenuated vaccines would become standardized through work done in the early 1900s up to the 1950s. This is a really important component of vaccine technology, and the discovery and use of attenuated vaccines would completely change the world.
And that’s all vaccines were for about a hundred years or more. A vaccine is a shortcut to trick your body into developing an immunity to a specific disease. So you don’t have to get sick and do it the hard way, which could involve actually dying. And in the case of really virulent bugs like smallpox, there’s no way to stop it. It just comes back again and again, killing a third of the entire population when it does. This is why parents who bring their kids to infection parties are just the worst, and they should be described in words that I can’t morally allow myself to say in a public forum. They’re just perpetuating outbreaks when they happen. They’re doing the disease’s work for it. Before vaccines, the best possible course of action was to isolate, and here they are deliberately infecting each other with completely preventable illnesses. This puts everyone in danger. All for a really uninformed and misguided attempt at self-preservation, yeah, it’s selfish, and guess what, it's going to backfire anyway. It’s beyond stupid, and truly, there’s an argument to be made that it’s not so far away from premeditated murder because it’s an intentional and willful act.
And it’s happening because all these parents started to get upset about the “chemicals” in vaccines. And I just don’t have enough time in my life to go wade through the crazy that brought that about, but in short, everything in the entire universe is made of chemicals. Go look up the chemical makeup of a blueberry.
But then sometimes there are specific chemicals that take the blame. The big one has always been thimerosal, which is a mercury-based preservative. Again, we just need some basic chemistry to understand why there’s no issue with thimerosal, even though it hasn’t been an ingredient in a single childhood vaccine since it was removed in 2001. Not to mention, both the MMR and the chickenpox vaccines have never contained thimerosal. The misunderstanding comes from confusing the two separate types of mercury--ethylmercury and methylmercury. Methylmercury is long-lasting inside the body and it bioaccumulates, or it increases in prevalence as you go up the food chain. So for instance, lots of apex predators in the ocean are full of methylmercury and therefore shouldn’t be eaten by women who are pregnant or trying to get pregnant, like tuna, swordfish, and shark. But ethylmercury, the kind in thimerosal, is a totally different compound that doesn’t last long in the body and doesn’t bioaccumulate. How do we know that it’s safe? Because we have so many studies and so much research behind this it’s not even funny. Vaccine science is hundreds of years old, with the practice going back thousands of years. In modern times we have data, so much data, involving hundreds of thousands if not millions of children.
Of course, the biggest crunchy claim in the wellness space is that vaccines cause autism. There were tons of fingers pointed at tons of different aspects of vaccines over the years, including thimerosal, but the evidence is very clear. After thimerosal was taken out of childhood vaccines in 2001, the rates of autism continued to rise, which is the exact opposite of what you’d expect to see if thimerosal somehow caused autism. And we have plenty of research now that points to real leads about why children might develop autism spectrum disorder, which is phenomenal and really promising.
The history of this claim goes back to 1998 when Andrew Wakefield published an unethical and flawed study about the MMR vaccine in order to sow doubt and push his own alternative vaccine that he himself developed and stood to make a ton of money from. I’ll likely do a whole video on that sordid historical disaster because it’s done such a number on public health and critical medical awareness to this day. But that’ll be for another time.
The next bogeyman that’s replaced thimerosal very effectively is the whole new class of vaccines that began with the covid shot just a few years ago. mRNA vaccines are vaccinations that are even safer and more effective than the attenuated vaccines we’ve been using safely for over a hundred years. So let’s deal with the mistrust here and get some things straight.
Messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, is a molecule--which is by the way, is a chemical compound; a molecule is the smallest possible chemical structure. We’re all made of chemicals, we just have this stuff swimming through us everywhere. (image: not me, I’m made of lego blocks.) Legos are made of chemicals, buddy.
mRNA takes instructions encoded in our DNA and hands it off to the protein-building systems in our cells. And proteins are everything in the body, they make everything work. They’re not just for gettin’ them gainz and being swole anymore. Proteins are for everyone, comrade, they are truly egalitarian macromolecules. So instead of injecting a deadly disease or a weakened strand of a deadly disease right into your bloods, mRNA vaccines are like little foremen who hand your body the blueprints it needs to create a small part of a virus inside itself. That’s what’s encoded in the mRNA you receive--in the case of the COVID vaccine, it’s the virus’s spike protein that’s produced when the directions arrive, which your body then immediately recognizes as an invasive entity and eliminates. Then, anytime you’re exposed to COVID in the future, you can already defend yourself from infection using the immune response from that process.
If people could just set aside their tinfoil hats for ten seconds they might be able to appreciate just how incredible this technology really is. It’s amazing. You’re providing your immune system with the ability to create a piece of a virus, not even the whole thing, so there’s no chance of getting infected at all, and then just waiting until your natural immune processes respond to the invader and build antibodies against it. It’s like if you’re making a fancy dinner and all you have to do is chop the garlic and then the whole thing is just magically plated in front of you. I mean, that is my kind of cooking. I like to cook, but I like convenience a little bit more.
mRNA technology is truly a game-changer. Research is exploding here, and soon we’re going to be able to eliminate even more diseases, including some types of cancer. If you can build an immune response to a specific protein in the body, then it’s theoretically possible to force your immune system to recognize only cancer cells or parts of cancer cells. If this had been around when I was going through interferon for adjuvant stage 3 cancer treatment or other people I know and love we’re enduring the absolute brutality of chemo, just think about how many really great f*cking people might still be around today. The treatment is as harsh or harsher than the disease, because until now we’ve had to nuke the whole thing from orbit in order to potentially save the patient. But ever so slowly, we’re building amazing technology that allows us to save people without trying to kill them, and for some reason, people are continuing to trust it less.
There are probably two main issues with the mRNA vaccination in the court of public opinion. One is simply that opponents are piggybacking on prior anti-vaxxer sentiment, and two, there’s always a sort of Frankenstein’s monster-inspired fear response anytime something new like this pops up on the scene. People just tend to feel icky about it. There’s lots of movies and media about the follies of messing with things, especially DNA and genetics, because we all know we’ll just eventually go in the machine and come out transformed into a giant drooling fly. There’s a lot of reasons for this, and some of them involve the complex moral and religious systems that we’ve grown up with, and some people will never be convinced. And that’s okay, we only need 95% or so.
And that’s just for measles. Each disease has its own threshold for herd immunity to trigger. Herd immunity occurs when enough people are inoculated against a particular illness that it can’t continue to move through the population, because there aren’t enough cells to infect and reproduce inside of anymore. Herd immunity is important because it protects the people who can’t take vaccines--yes, there really are legitimate reasons that some people shouldn’t vaccinate, but it has nothing to do with whatever goal post moving the conspiracy crowd has done. There’s a CDC guide down in the didgeridoo that goes through each vaccine and who might be unable to get it. Most everything involves age and allergies.
Herd immunity is also important for eradication efforts. Only two diseases have ever been eradicated off the face of the Earth. One of them is, guess what--smallpox. Look at that, we’ve come full circle. It was the first major killer disease of humanity and the first one that we clamored over treatments and cures for centuries to get control over. And then, we finally had a vaccine. After that, the World Health Organization orchestrated a massive public health and vaccination campaign beginning in 1967 that succeeded in eradicating smallpox in the year 1980. The other disease was called rinderpest and it affected cows, and that was finally taken care of in 2011.
So how do we get more people on board with the actual facts so that we can reach herd immunity or even eradicate more diseases? Because today there are 25 vaccines available and 16 more in the development pipeline. Maybe the most unfortunate reality we have to come to terms with is that vaccines are a victim of their own success. We don’t have people walking around covered in smallpox sores anymore while they stumble, catastrophically to their deaths looking all gross and disgusting and deteriorating in realtime in the corner. We don’t have the more serious and awful diseases of the world running rampant here in the U.S. like tuberculosis or ebola. We don’t have to look at it. A lot of the reason why we don’t have to look at these things is because of vaccines. They’ve eliminated or pushed out really horrendous bugs from our society. People don’t remember anymore the kids who died horrifically from polio or were disabled for life and couldn’t walk or had to live in an iron lung.
And now we have someone running the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who spouts all of the debunked conspiracy nonsense that antivaxxers have been shouting about for decades now. And you can thank Andrew Wakefield and one garbage study along with the “natural” health and wellness space for all that. One thing that antivaxxers love to say is just follow the money, and in this case they’re right. The wellness space was a $6.8 trillion industry in 2023, which means it’s worth even more now. And Wakefield was literally trying to enrich himself by replacing the standard MMR vaccine with his own vaccine.
RJK Jr., AKA Secretary Brain Worm, is downplaying the current measles outbreak in Texas. He told people to, ya know, take vitamins and cod liver oil. Hopefully it doesn’t need to be said but there’s no possible physical mechanism where that could fight off measles. It’s a half a step up in IQ points from Citrus Caesar’s COVID solution of injecting bleach into the body.
Short aside here but studies have shown that people who take daily multivitamins actually experience a 4% increased mortality rate from all causes over those who don’t take multivitamins. It just shows that we have people in charge who don’t care about reality and don’t follow any actual science to inform their policy decisions, and I use the word policy very very lightly in this case, and they are honestly just as effective and knowledgeable about public health as the whale head the RFK Jr. cut off with a chainsaw and took home on the roof of his car. Yes, that’s a real thing. But actually, maybe when that whale was alive it was a whale scientist or just wasn’t stupid and knew how to not deliberately infect its whale buddies and whale family and didn’t go around spreading horrifying ocean diseases. So in that respect, RFK Jr. is likely much dumber than a rotting whale head, that he also probably ate some of.
As daughter Kathleen Kennedy said of the incident: “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
Don’t look this up. He’s a gross human being. But, you know, let’s put him in charge of human health.
Alright, so what can we do? Obviously, go get vaccinated. Get all the vaccines that you should reasonably receive. I get the pneumonia vaccine even though I don’t have to because I’ve had pneumonia twice before. It’s not necessary but it is preventative in populations that have a higher risk attached. Talk to your friends and family. Try to talk to them about the science. If they don’t listen to facts then pivot to an angle that might make it through. Talk about the economics of it. It’s always “follow the money with the conspiracy crowd,” which is the right instinct actually, so yes, follow it. And reiterate that pharmaceutical companies don’t actually make that much money on vaccines. It’s a public health service funded mostly by the government, our tax money. Vaccines accounted for just 8% of pharmaceutical revenue in 2021. But you know what does cost a lot of money? Unregulated nonsense treatments pushed by wellness industry grifters that do absolutely nothing and in a lot of cases are actually harmful. There are loads of awful fake treatments that prey on people who feel scared and helpless and take their money and do nothing.
Appeal to people’s emotional reality. Start conversations by humanizing key figures and situations. Dr. Anthony Fauci is a person just like you or me. He’s dedicated his life to working tirelessly for the public good. Thousands of lab techs and researchers are working right now to improve conditions on Earth and eliminate suffering even further than we already have. You probably know some of them. You probably know that most people just want to do their jobs and get a paycheck and aren’t running around in some international cabal hiding secrets from you every moment of every day. As I’ve said before, all conspiracies fail the moment you realize just how many people would have to be keeping a secret. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to keep a secret in my life, and those were for far less things than you know, deviously destroying the lives of everyone on the planet for some completely inexplicable reason.
You know, do we want our society to follow facts and evidence and advance positive life experience and outcomes for everyone and thrive for potentially thousands of years to come, or do we want to share Facebook memes about how grandma thinks polio isn’t that bad and you should just rub some Vicks on it. I know which I’d rather live in.
Let’s get behind vaccines and vaccine science, and push for better public health education. Let’s do some f*cking good about completely preventable illnesses.
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