Connecting The Dots -- The Book Page -- The Pandemic Page -- The Vaccine Page -- February 4, 2024

Locator: 46737BOOKS.

Tag: Covid, Covid-19, Fauci

I stumbled across A History of the Jews in America, Howard M. Sachar, c. 1992, in a used bookstore in Nashville, TN, some months ago.

Some time earlier I had run across to Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews, Volume Two, 1492 - 1900, or maybe it was Volume 1. Probably Volume 1 which I subsequently gave to my son-in-law as a Christmas present. He's a pastor at a small church outside Portland, Oregon.

Incredible book.

That led me to Simon Schama's most recent: Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations, published September 19, 2023.

That led me to Waldemar Haffkine,

... a Russian-French bacteriologist known for his pioneering work in vaccines. Haffkine was educated at the Imperial Novorossiya University and later emigrated first to Switzerland, then to France, working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he developed a cholera vaccine that he tried out successfully in India.

He is recognized as the first microbiologist who developed and used vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. He tested the vaccines on himself. Joseph Lister, named him "a saviour of humanity".

That led me to Éllie Metchnikoff, 

... a zoologist from the Russian Empire of Moldavian noble ancestry best known for his pioneering research in immunology and thanatology (study of death).

He and Paul Ehrlich were jointly awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "in recognition of their work on immunity."

Mechnikov was born in a region of the Russian Empire that is today part of modern-day Ukraine to a Moldavian noble father and a Ukrainian-Jewish mother, and later on continued his career in France.

Given this complex heritage, five different nations and peoples lay claim to Metchnikoff. Despite having a mother of Jewish origin, he was baptized Russian Orthodox, although he later became an atheist.

Honoured as the "father of innate immunity", Metchnikoff was the first to discover a process of immunity called phagocytosis and the cell responsible for it, called phagocyte, specifically macrophage, in 1882. This discovery turned out to be the major defence mechanism in innate immunity, as well as the foundation of the concept of cell-mediated immunity, while Ehrlich established the concept of humoral immunity to complete the principles of immune system. Their works are regarded as the foundation of the science of immunology.

And that led me to Paul Ehrlich, 

... a Nobel Prize-winning German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology, and antimicrobial chemotherapy. Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing the precursor technique to Gram staining bacteria. The methods he developed for staining tissue made it possible to distinguish between different types of blood cells, which led to the ability to diagnose numerous blood diseases. His laboratory discovered arsphenamine (Salvarsan), the first effective medicinal treatment for syphilis, thereby initiating and also naming the concept of chemotherapy. Ehrlich popularized the concept of a magic bullet. He also made a decisive contribution to the development of an antiserum to combat diphtheria and conceived a method for standardizing therapeutic serums.[1] 

And of course that led me to Albert Ludwig Sigesmund Neisseer, 

... a German physician who discovered the causative agent of gonorrhea, a strain of bacteria that was named in his honour (Neisseria gonorrhoeae).

Neisser was born in the Silesian town of Schweidnitz (now Świdnica, in Poland), the son of a well-known Jewish physician, Moritz Neisser. After he completed the elementary school in Münsterberg, Neisser enrolled in the St. Maria Magdalena School in Breslau (now Wrocław, in Poland). In this school, he was a contemporary of another great name in the history of medicine, Paul Ehrlich. He obtained the Abitur in 1872.

Neisser began to study medicine at the University of Breslau, but later moved to Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany, completing his studies in 1877.

Initially Neisser wanted to be an internist, but did not find a suitable place. He found work, however as an assistant of the dermatologist Oskar Simon (1845–1892), concentrating on sexually transmitted diseases and leprosy.

During the following two years he studied and obtained experimental evidence about the pathogen for gonorrhea, Neisseria gonorrhoeae.

Neisser was also the co-discoverer of the causative agent of leprosy. In 1879 the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen gave to young Neisser (who had visited him in Norway to examine some 100 leprosy patients) some tissue samples of his patients. Neisser successfully stained the bacteria and announced his findings in 1880, claiming to have discovered the pathogenesis of leprosy. There was some conflict between Neisser and Hansen, because Hansen had failed to culture the organism and demonstrate unequivocally its link to leprosy, although he had observed the bacterium since 1872.

Where links are not provided, go to wiki.