Simon Schama on how inoculation changed the world
HistoryExtra podcast
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The Black Death
12 million people die in the Asia bubonic plague between the middle of the 1890s and the early 1920s. Havki is turning out 80 100 000 doses per day so two million doses and he's working with just you know we think of Pfizer and Moderna, AstraZeneca who knows how many people are actually producing the necessary doses here. In 1902 in a tiny village called Mulkowal in Punjab 19 people die of tetanus poisoning as a result of one contaminated batch of plague vaccine. It takes till 1907 for Havki to be fully vindicated and given a kind of job back but he's still kept away from vaccine production.
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