Advanced Therapeutics, Vaccines & Medical Countermeasures

10th century onward · over 1,000 years ago

Chinese physicians practised variolation, inoculating people with smallpox material to induce immunity

Chinese practitioners are reported to have inoculated people with smallpox material to induce immunity as far back as the tenth century; historian Joseph Needham attributes the earliest practice to Taoists, though the claim is contested because it was not written about at the time. The technique, using dried smallpox scabs blown into the nose, spread along trade routes to the Ottoman Empire and reached Britain and North America in the 1720s, centuries before Jenner's safer cowpox-based method replaced it.

15th century · 626 years ago

Chinese practitioners documented variolation by nasal insufflation of powdered smallpox scabs

The oldest documented use of variolation dates to fifteenth-century China, using powdered smallpox material, usually scabs, blown up the nostrils. Various insufflation techniques were recorded through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was the first systematic method of inducing protective immunity against a specific disease.

1700 · 326 years ago

Royal Society in London received two reports on the Chinese practice of inoculation

Martin Lister relayed an account from an East India Company employee stationed in China, and Clopton Havers submitted a separate report. These transmissions brought knowledge of inoculation into European scientific circles. They preceded the practice's adoption in Britain by two decades.

1721 · 305 years ago

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought variolation from Turkey to Britain and had her daughter inoculated

Having witnessed variolation in Turkey, Montagu had her four-year-old daughter variolated before physicians of the Royal Court on her return to England. The demonstration attracted the attention of the royal family, who helped promote the procedure. This marked the introduction of deliberate smallpox immunisation to Britain.

1721 · 305 years ago

Charles Maitland conducted an experimental variolation of six prisoners at Newgate Prison

Maitland tested variolation on six prisoners in London, and the experiment succeeded. It served as an early clinical trial of an immunising procedure and helped legitimise variolation in Britain.

1783 · 243 years ago

Prince Octavius of Great Britain died days after inoculation, exposing the risks of variolation

The prince's death several days after being inoculated highlighted the dangers of variolation with live smallpox virus. Such incidents underlined the need for a safer immunising agent.

1796 · 230 years ago

Edward Jenner demonstrated that cowpox exposure protected against smallpox

Jenner took pus from the hand of a milkmaid with cowpox, scratched it into the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps, and later variolated the boy with smallpox, observing that he did not contract the disease. This heterotypic immunisation was far safer than variolation with smallpox virus itself, and Jenner gave the practice its name from the Latin for cowpox, founding modern vaccination while building on inoculation traditions practised elsewhere for centuries.

• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had already brought variolation from the Ottoman Empire to Britain decades before Jenner

1798 · 228 years ago

Edward Jenner published his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae reporting vaccine safety and arm-to-arm transfer

Jenner reported that his vaccine was safe in children and adults and could be passed arm-to-arm, reducing reliance on uncertain supplies from infected cows. The long title of the work gave rise to the terms vaccine and vaccination. Publication turned a local observation into a transferable public health technology.

1804 · 222 years ago

Spain launched the Balmis smallpox vaccination expedition to Mexico and the Philippines

Because cowpox vaccine survived only twelve days in vitro, the expedition used arm-to-arm transport to carry live vaccine to Spain's colonies. It was among the first state-organised international vaccination campaigns and demonstrated logistical solutions to vaccine perishability.

1840 · 186 years ago

England banned smallpox inoculation in favour of cowpox vaccination

With cowpox vaccination proving much safer, variolation with live smallpox virus was outlawed despite remaining widely practised. The ban was an early example of regulation shaping which countermeasures a state permitted.

late 19th century · 226 years ago

National governments adopted compulsory vaccination laws and treated vaccines as national prestige

From the late nineteenth century vaccines were considered a matter of national prestige, and states adopted national vaccination policies. Compulsory vaccination laws were passed, embedding immunisation in public administration.

1880s · 146 years ago

Louis Pasteur introduced the second generation of vaccines for chicken cholera and anthrax

Pasteur developed attenuated vaccines beyond the cowpox model, extending immunisation to bacterial diseases. His work established vaccine development as a laboratory science rather than a folk practice.

1881 · 145 years ago

Louis Pasteur proposed extending the terms vaccine and vaccination to all protective inoculations

To honour Jenner, Pasteur suggested the smallpox-derived vocabulary should cover the new protective inoculations then being developed. The proposal fixed the general terminology of the field.

1885 · 141 years ago

Louis Pasteur developed the first laboratory-attenuated vaccine and used it to save a rabies patient

Treating nine-year-old Joseph Meister with a vaccine grown and weakened in his laboratory, rather than derived from a naturally mild disease as Jenner's had been, Pasteur established the general method for making vaccines against any pathogen.

1890 · 136 years ago

Emil von Behring developed diphtheria antitoxin, the first medical countermeasure based on passive immunity

Injecting serum containing antibodies from immunised animals treated diphtheria and tetanus in patients who already had the disease, a distinct approach from preventive vaccination that won Behring the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

1928 · 98 years ago

Diphtheria vaccination incident killed 12 of 21 children through Staphylococcus contamination of preservative-free vaccine

A diphtheria vaccine lacking a preservative caused fatal Staphylococcus infection in twelve of twenty-one inoculated children. The disaster established the need for preservatives in multi-dose vaccine preparations.

1930s · 96 years ago

Vaccine researchers pursued the prophylactic value of an oral typhoid fever vaccine

Interest grew in oral delivery of vaccines during the 1930s, building on earlier twentieth-century attempts whose promise had been uneven. At the time the very possibility of an effective oral antibacterial vaccine was controversial.

1931 · 95 years ago

Alice Miles Woodruff and Ernest Goodpasture showed fowlpox virus could be grown in embryonated chicken eggs

Their documentation of viral growth in eggs gave vaccinology a practical means of propagating viruses at scale. Scientists soon cultivated other viruses the same way, opening the era of viral vaccines.

1935 · 91 years ago

Vaccine developers used eggs to propagate virus for a yellow fever vaccine

The yellow fever vaccine was among the first products of egg-based virus propagation. It demonstrated the practical value of the Woodruff–Goodpasture technique.

1945 · 81 years ago

Vaccine developers produced an influenza vaccine using egg-based propagation

Egg propagation was applied to influenza, yielding a vaccine against a rapidly changing respiratory pathogen. The method remained central to influenza vaccine manufacture.

1950s · 76 years ago

Vaccinologists developed the polio vaccine

The polio vaccine was among the major achievements of twentieth-century vaccinology. Its deployment restricted polio from much of the world.

1955 · 71 years ago

Jonas Salk introduced the first effective polio vaccine

The inactivated vaccine, tested in one of the largest clinical trials ever conducted, was released without patent for free public use, and mass vaccination campaigns sharply cut polio cases across the US and, later, much of the world.

1958 · 68 years ago

United States cut measles cases from 763,094 to under 150 a year through new vaccines

In 1958 the United States recorded 763,094 measles cases and 552 deaths. After the introduction of new vaccines, annual cases fell to fewer than 150, and by early 2008 only 64 cases were suspected. The contrast became a standard demonstration of vaccine effectiveness.

1959 · 67 years ago

Vaccine manufacturers replaced eggs with cell culture and growth media as the standard for virus propagation

Cell culture became the standard method of propagating viruses for vaccines, superseding embryonated eggs. The shift expanded which viruses could be grown and how consistently vaccines could be produced.

early 1960s · 66 years ago

Polio vaccine developers raised the doses of serotypes 1 and 3 to counter immune interference

The relative doses of serotypes in the polio vaccine were adjusted so that no single serotype suppressed the response to others. It was an early demonstration of managing valence in multivalent vaccines.

1960s–70s · 66 years ago

Global vaccination campaigns achieved the eradication of smallpox

Widespread immunity from vaccination led to the worldwide eradication of smallpox during the 1960s and 1970s. It remains the definitive proof that a vaccine can extinguish a human disease.

1980 · 46 years ago

The World Health Assembly certified smallpox eradicated worldwide

A coordinated global vaccination and surveillance campaign eliminated a disease that had killed hundreds of millions of people across history, the only human disease eradicated through vaccination to date and still the field's benchmark achievement.

Early 2026 · 6 months ago

African countries continued introducing malaria vaccines into routine childhood immunisation

Ghana, Nigeria, the Central African Republic and others expanded rollout of the R21 and RTS,S vaccines, both requiring multiple doses and used alongside bed nets and other measures, as manufacturing capacity gradually caught up with continent-wide demand.

• Demand still outstripped available doses in several countries

June 2025 · last year

US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr replaced the government's vaccine advisory committee

Kennedy dismissed all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and installed new appointees, several sceptical of established vaccine schedules, a shift that also saw removal of routine COVID-19 vaccination recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women.

January 2025 · last year

The US began formally withdrawing from the World Health Organization

The one-year withdrawal process, triggered on the new administration's first day in office, removed the organisation's largest historical funding source and forced WHO to cut programmes and staff, with knock-on effects for vaccine research coordination and outbreak response funding.

January 2025 · last year

Uganda contained an Ebola Sudan virus outbreak using a rapid vaccine trial

Health authorities and international partners began a ring vaccination trial with a candidate vaccine within days of the outbreak's declaration, an unusually fast research response that drew on preparedness work developed since earlier Ebola epidemics in the region.

2025 · last year

EuBiologics expanded production of oral cholera vaccine

The South Korean firm, which supplies most of the global stockpile, increased output as simultaneous outbreaks across Africa, the Middle East and Haiti kept demand well above what a single-dose emergency regimen, adopted to stretch limited supply, could fully meet.

2025 · last year

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance held a replenishment summit clouded by uncertainty over US funding

Donors pledged funds toward the alliance's next five-year immunisation programme for lower-income countries, but the total fell short of its target after the US signalled it would cut its historic contribution, a gap other donors and manufacturers scrambled to address.

• USAID's dismantlement had already disrupted vaccine delivery logistics in several countries earlier in the year

August 2024 · 2 years ago

The WHO declared mpox a public health emergency for the second time in three years

A new clade Ib strain spreading from the Democratic Republic of the Congo into neighbouring countries prompted the declaration, triggering vaccine donations from the US, EU and Japan that Africa CDC coordinated for distribution across the continent.

• Vaccine supply remained far below what the outbreak required

July 2024 · 2 years ago

Finland became one of the first countries to offer H5N1 vaccine to at-risk workers

Fur farm and poultry workers judged at higher risk of exposure to avian influenza were offered a stockpiled human vaccine as a precaution, ahead of most other countries even as the virus continued spreading through wild birds, poultry and, in the US, dairy cattle.

2024 · 2 years ago

Vaccine manufacturers in Vietnam, Bangladesh and other spoke countries advanced mRNA production capability transferred from the WHO's South African hub

Technology transfer under the programme progressed unevenly, with some spoke countries further along than others in building the regulatory and manufacturing capacity needed to produce mRNA vaccines domestically rather than relying on donations or imports.

2024 · 2 years ago

The Serum Institute of India expanded manufacturing of newer vaccines for domestic and export markets

The world's largest vaccine maker by volume ramped up production of pneumococcal and HPV vaccines alongside its role manufacturing the R21 malaria vaccine for African rollout, reinforcing India's position as a critical supplier to global immunisation programmes.

2021 · 5 years ago

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received Columbia University's Horwitz Prize for pioneering mRNA vaccine research

The award recognised the foundational work that made mRNA vaccine technology possible. It marked scientific validation of the platform after its pandemic deployment.

2021 · 5 years ago

World Trade Organization and governments weighed waiving patents on COVID-19 vaccines

With production urgently needed during the pandemic, the WTO and governments evaluated suspending intellectual property rights on COVID-19 vaccines to remove barriers to affordable access and scale up manufacturing. The debate exposed how patent regimes govern who can make medical countermeasures.

2020 · 6 years ago

Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna developed effective COVID-19 vaccines in under a year

Using messenger RNA technology developed over the previous decade, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna took a vaccine from pathogen identification to authorised use in under twelve months, a pace previous vaccine development had never approached and one now targeted as a template for future pandemics. Development was aided by Operation Warp Speed, and the massive deployment of vaccines such as BNT162b2 was the first large-scale use of a third-generation nucleic-acid vaccine platform.

2019 · 7 years ago

World Health Organization named vaccine hesitancy a top ten global health threat

The WHO listed hesitancy among the ten leading threats to global health. The designation framed public acceptance, not just supply and science, as a determinant of immunisation capability.

2018 · 8 years ago

Merck deployed the licensed rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine in Congo

The vaccine licensed to Merck was used to combat an Ebola outbreak in Congo. It showed vaccines being deployed as outbreak countermeasures against a high-lethality pathogen.

2016 · 10 years ago

National Institutes of Health, Inovio Pharmaceuticals and GeneOne Life Science began human tests of DNA vaccines against Zika virus

A DNA vaccine for Zika entered testing at the NIH while Inovio and GeneOne trialled a different DNA candidate in Miami. Volume manufacturing remained unsolved at the time. The trials marked the clinical arrival of third-generation nucleic-acid vaccines.

2013 · 13 years ago

Scientists began building synthetic third-generation vaccines by reconstructing viral outer structures

Researchers sought to reconstruct the outside structure of viruses synthetically, hoping to prevent vaccine resistance. The work represented a shift towards rationally designed rather than pathogen-derived immunogens.

2009–11 · 17 years ago

United Kingdom and United States added the human papillomavirus vaccine to recommended schedules

The HPV vaccine was recommended in the UK from 2009 and in the US by 2011. Its adoption marked the routine use of a vaccine against a cancer-causing infection.

2006 · 20 years ago

Vaccine developers introduced a shingles vaccine for the elderly

A vaccine against shingles, caused by the chickenpox virus, was introduced, targeting a disease that usually affects older people. It extended routine immunisation into adult and geriatric schedules.

2006 · 20 years ago

Gardasil became the first vaccine developed specifically to prevent cancer

By targeting the human papillomavirus strains responsible for most cervical cancer cases, the vaccine offered a preventive tool against a cancer that kills disproportionately in lower-income countries with limited access to cervical screening.

2005 · 21 years ago

Plant biotechnologists developed bananas producing a human hepatitis B vaccine

Bananas were engineered to express a hepatitis B vaccine antigen. The demonstration advanced the concept of edible, plant-produced vaccines.

2003 · 23 years ago

Vaccine researchers identified vaccine production via transgenic plants

The idea of manufacturing vaccines in genetically modified plants was identified as a possible route to cheaper production. It pointed towards decentralised, agricultural biomanufacturing.

2001 · 25 years ago

Dengue vaccine researchers reported serotype interference in dengue vaccines

A study found the DEN-3 serotype predominated and suppressed responses to DEN-1, -2 and -4. The finding identified a central obstacle to multivalent dengue immunisation.

2000 · 26 years ago

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance was founded to expand vaccine access in poorer countries

Backed by the Gates Foundation, the WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank and donor governments, the alliance pooled funding and negotiated lower vaccine prices, credited with helping immunise hundreds of millions of additional children in the decades that followed.

1990 · 36 years ago

Persian Gulf campaign preparations used whole cell pertussis vaccine as an adjuvant for anthrax vaccine

In preparing for the Gulf campaign, the whole cell pertussis vaccine was employed to boost the response to anthrax vaccine. The episode illustrates military use of vaccines as biological-warfare countermeasures.

1988 · 38 years ago

The World Health Assembly launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative

The campaign cut annual polio cases by over 99% from an estimated hundreds of thousands in the late 1980s, eliminating the disease from all but a handful of countries, though conflict and vaccine hesitancy repeatedly delayed final eradication.