The problem with this simple story is that it is a boldfaced lie: not apocryphal, but confirmed as having been made up. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face.” Witnessing an outbreak of smallpox in the English countryside, this loquacious milkmaid is said to have told Jenner, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. The PBS NewsHour goes further and puts words in one milkmaid’s mouth. George’s University of London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine both put forward the yarn as canon in the history of vaccines (as does Pfizer!), and we find it repeated in Forbes and the Guardian. This tale is so good, it can be found on authoritative websites, like the Centers for Disease Control’s and Encyclopedia Britannica’s. It’s a story that has legs, a veritable quadruped trumpeting the genius of this brave scientific mind. And just like that, Jenner tested his brilliant hypothesis on a young boy by vaccinating him using material from a cowpox pustule, and the boy was proven immune from smallpox. He intuited that their exposure to cowpox when milking cattle had given them protection from smallpox. At a time when smallpox was endemic and was scarring the faces of the people who survived it, Jenner noticed that milkmaids would always escape from this dermatological blight. You see, milkmaids were renowned for their beauty. Edward Jenner invented vaccines because of an observation he and he alone made.
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