MAURICE HILLEMAN: A Truly Remarkable Medical Researcher

  Here is a video sent to me hailing the incredibly quick development of the vaccine for COVID-19:

How wonderful that while it took more than 3000 years for medical science to develop the vaccine for Small Pox and Polio, it took only four months to accomplish this task for COVID-19.  Watch that video.

Well, I then thought something was missing.  On 7March2021 I had a posting entitled, HOW EASILY WE FORGET.  To summarize:

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  In the 1957-8 period, there was a pandemic from the H2N2 Asian Avian Flu.
• The origin was Guizhou, China, about 600 miles from Wuhan.
• Up to 4 million died (note that COVID-19 has not quite reached 4 million yet).
• The world population then was 2.9 billion, so on a per capita basis, that 4 million of today would be nearly 10.6 million.  
• It is reasonably safe to say that the total world deaths from COVID-19 will not reach that number when the pandemic is deemed over.
• The threat was to those UNDER 50 years of age.
• There was no economic upheaval and no one in the U.S. wore masks.
• Very few of us oldsters even remember that there was a pandemic.
• 
  HERE IS THE SURPRISE.  
• Do you know how long it took to develop an H2/N2 vaccine?  Four months, the same as for COVID-19 with all the advancements today available to medical science.
• Who developed this vaccine?  Maurice Hilleman of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and his team.

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  There was then an antigenic shift of the H2N2 virus into H3N2 so that a decade later there was the 1968 Hong Kong Flu Pandemic.
• Again, globally, 4 million perished.
• The world population was 3.5 million, so compared with our population today of 7.7 billion, the per capita comparison should be 8.8 million, which won't be eclipsed by COVID-19.

• 
  Guess how long it took to develop a vaccine...and who did it?  Four months!  By the same Maurice Hilleman (photo in 2005).  Who even remembers him today?  There should be a large statue of him at Walter Reed.
• Actually it's more than that...MUCH, MUCH MORE! 

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  He and his teams have MORE THAN 40 vaccines to their credit, and they have saved 8 million lives!!!  
• Hilleman is the inventor of vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis and chickenpox.
• He was mostly known as the grumpy guy who came to those AIDS meeting when he was in his 80s, a story from Tony Fauci.
• The Golden Age of vaccines was in the decade of the 50's and 60's.

Got to end with something funny:

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  Hilleman described his dating experiences:  “I had a couple of dates. Christ. Finding women is sort of like by Brownian action. You don't know whether they're drunkards, or they'll spend all your money, or whether they have venereal diseases.”
• To continue:  Giving up on the dating scene, he instead decided to hunt for a wife among the job applicant pool at Merck and Company in West Point, Pennsylvania, where he worked. He enlisted the aid of his administrative assistant. “I said, 'Look, Ken, I want you to go through all these [job] applications and pick out what looks good to you, then send them up to me, and we'll do that once a week until we find one,'” Hilleman recalls. On hearing this, a young woman in the audience at the symposium remarked to her companion, “You couldn't get away with that today.”
  
• He worked every day, even for Merck, a company he joined after his government job.
• His cure for mumps came when his oldest daughter Jeryl Lynn (on left this photo) caught this disease.  He took a culture from her, and used it to develop the mumps vaccine.

Here is another way to look at how relatively insignificant COVID-19 has been, in terms of deaths compared to other pandemics:

I belong to a photography club, and every so often we are asked to take black and white photos because there is something about capturing the right mood or significance by using this particular medium.  Every time I try to do this, I end up with the color version still looking better.  Here is a video about Jecinci Colorizations that sort of says the same thing.  Jecinci is a 40-year old architect and artist from Romania, who must be now be in the range of colorizing 1500 photos.  Recognize her?

Amelia Earhart.  Only last month there was an announcement that her crashed plane was possibly found in a lagoon on Nikumaroro Island at Seven Site:

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The first hurricane of the season formed in the East Pacific.  Nothing yet this year in the Atlantic.  Hurricane Enrique, now at 85 MPH, will skirt the Mexican coastline and approach Baha:

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