In Kazakhstan, they just unveiled a monument to a 2016 incident when a group of people pulled a stray dog from the reservoir.
intercst
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That’s very nice.
I’m not holding my breath for monuments to the inventors of vaccines, who saved millions of human lives.
Wendy
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There’s one to Edward Jenner in Kensington Gardens. Passed it a few times when wandering about. I can’t believe I took it and his work for granted. Who’da thunk there’d still be an anti vaccine lobby as strong….or stronger…..than in his day!
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Ooh….look what I found…
Obelisk to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu - Wikipedia Obelisk to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu - Wikipedia
Inoculation predated vaccination. Jenner had been inoculated as a child….some of his children also …..and is given as the reason he used a trusty, local yokel’s son as his first vaccination subject rather than one of his own family.
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They get Noble prizes.
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Small pox be gone! I have two small vaccination marks on my left arm. 
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I was vaccinated twice for smallpox but have no marks. The doctor said that I am naturally immune to smallpox. There’s no way to know how many ancestral cousins died of smallpox so natural selection could bring survival to the few who were naturally immune.
Wendy
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Didn’t know there was such a thing.
Because of its low occurrence it would seem to be of minimal evolutionary advantage.
DB2
Every mutation that confers an advantage starts with a single individual. With a highly contagious disease like smallpox that has high mortality, the mutation that confers immunity would have a strong evolutionary advantage even if it starts (like all mutations) with a low occurrence.
Let’s say that a village has 100 people. The village is struck by smallpox and 30% of the people die. But the immune people do not die.
AI Overview
Epidemic smallpox, caused by variola major, generally had a mortality rate of approximately 30%. While the most common form resulted in this 30% death rate, rare, severe forms like flat or hemorrhagic smallpox were almost 100% fatal, particularly affecting babies and unvaccinated individuals. Of course, in the old country everybody was unvaccinated. [end AI]
Let’s say that one person had the smallpox-immunity mutation. Before the epidemic this was hidden. The person was 1 out of 100 inhabitants so the mutation was rare (1%). But after the epidemic there were only 70 people left and the immune person was 1 out of 70 (1.4%) of the population. If the mutation was dominant then half their children would also be immune. Every time there was a smallpox epidemic the immune family would have a survival advantage. This is exactly how mutations that confer a survival advantage spread in a population. Once the mutation reaches about 5–10% of the population, it could potentially sweep through a significant majority (over 70%) in 20 to 50 generations. Look up the Haldane equation. Humans are long-lived so the speed is slow but a mutation that confers a 30% survival benefit is not minimal.
Wendy
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@WendyBG …. not to mention that “low occurrence” of smallpox (or, for all practical purposes, total eradication status in the 1980s) is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It post dates the introduction of vaccination (just over 500 years if my math is correct). No time at all in terms of evolutionary change, if the thinking is that a genetic variant is likely to disappear once the advantage it confers is redundant.
There are people all over the place with weird genetic traits (your natural resistance is a new one for me too) A FB friend and former TMFer has a really weird resistance to a good many of the common vaccines. Found out that she has never mounted an immune response to the rubella vaccine, in spite of numerous attempts. Likewise the Hep B vaccine. Also, after a DVT and starting Warfarin therapy (theoretically ramping up gradually) her first INR reading was 9….everso high. Where do these quirky traits come from and what might’ve been the advantage when they occured.
Not every (even) beneficial mutation has “an advantage”. Sometimes, just not having a disadvantage is enough. So long as it doesn’t affect mortality up through child-bearing age it will continue, unseen and unfelt, forever - at least until that mutation does wind up having a detrimental effect (which may be never.) These “neutral” mutations can add up, ending in something scientists call genetic drift.
“Evolution” only really cares about the bad stuff - and it really cares because you can die, and the good stuff, which has to be really good to make a difference.
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I have an uncle who spent 2 years in bed after that vaccination. Imagine the public response today.
Then there are the theories around the abstraction of a selfishness gene. Without which there is no genetic motivation. But that might just be mitochondrial.