A new look at one of the most successful vaccination campaigns in history, which rapidly eradicated smallpox in Copenhagen in the early 1800s, has uncovered possible lessons for boosting vaccine uptake in modern times.
Smallpox was a devastating disease that killed three in 10 infected people and left many others with disfiguring scars or blindness. In total, it claimed an estimated 500 million lives before a global vaccination campaign finally stamped it out for good in 1980.
One of the earliest local eradications of the disease, however, was achieved back in 1808 in Copenhagen, where smallpox had killed over 12,000 people in the previous half century.
The smallpox vaccine, the first ever vaccine, was invented by the English physician Edward Jenner in 1796. Word quickly spread to the Danish medical community and social elite, sparking “excited attention and expectation,” wrote Henrich Callisen, a leading Danish physician at the time.
