Vaccination
Vaccination Timeline: Key Milestones That Shaped Modern Immunisation
2025-12-17
Intro
Vaccination isn’t one story — it’s a long chain of system design, trust, logistics, and biology.
Here are the milestones that still shape policy today.
Key Points
- Vaccination success depends as much on systems as on science
- “Universal” schedules often exist to compensate for real-world gaps
- Birth-dose policies are usually about redundancy, not fear
Timeline
- 1796 — Early smallpox inoculation work becomes a prototype for vaccination.
- 1955 — Polio vaccine era begins; mass campaigns become a modern template.
- 1960s–1970s — Global scale-up: measles programs expand and routine childhood schedules consolidate.
- 1980 — Smallpox eradication declared; vaccination becomes a proof-of-concept for elimination.
- 1991 — Universal infant hepatitis B vaccination becomes a major strategy in settings prioritising perinatal prevention.
- 2000s — Wider use of combination vaccines and schedule optimisation.
- 2020s — Trust, misinformation, and politicisation become central constraints in high-income countries.
Related Reading
- Vaccination Hub
- Hepatitis B Birth Dose: Why It Exists and Why It Matters
- Hepatitis B Vaccine: Benefits, Timing, and Safety
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