• COVID-19
• public health
• health care economics and organisations

Sitting in his garden in Berkeley, England, in 1796, Edward Jenner injected James Phipps, an 8-year-old boy and son of his gardener, with pus from a cowpox patient. It was the first recognised step in the development of modern-day vaccines and would also ultimately lead to the eradication of smallpox, which is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of around 300 million people.1

Jenner’s innovation was an evolution of existing ideas—inoculation or variolation had been known about since the 1600s spreading from China and Africa to Europe—but his experimentation with cowpox was widely recognised as the world’s first controlled vaccination against smallpox. He was also the one who named the procedure vaccination from the Latin word for cowpox—‘vaccinia’.

At the time, like many novel innovations, Jenner struggled to get traction and was …