INNOVATIVE
INOCULATION

Topics: Atonement; Blood of Christ; Body; Creativity; Determination; Diligence; Disease; Illness; Opportunity; Perseverance; Problems; Resourcefulness; Results; Salvation

References: Ecclesiastes 9:10; Matthew 26:28; John 6:56; Romans 5:9; 1 Corinthians 15:55

Dr. George Moore, a public health worker, was sent to Nepal in 1952. He found only one hospital in the country, which was for the royalty. Life expectancy of the people in Nepal was thirty-five years, and 98 percent of the population hadn’t had any medical treatment in their short lives.

Moore and his colleague attacked malaria by spraying the inside of huts with insecticide. Their second major challenge, smallpox, was more difficult. Smallpox vaccine must be refrigerated, and in the early 1950s, there was no way to get refrigerators to primitive villages.

So Moore thought up a plan. He got a small batch of vaccine from the United States and stored it in the small kerosene refrigerator at his base camp. Then, using that vaccine, he inoculated some small boys and took those boys with him to the villages.

When someone is inoculated with smallpox vaccine, they get a mild case of the disease—too mild to make them sick, but strong enough to give them permanent immunity. They also develop a smallpox blister at the point of the injection.

Moore would break the smallpox blister in a vaccinated boy, dip the end of a string into the blister, then touch that infected string to a small opening in the skin of the person he wanted to protect. That was how the assault on the killer disease began.

—Marcus Rosenbaum, “Dr. Moore’s Mountaintop House Calls,” NPR Weekend Edition (September 16, 2006)