Topic · across the network

Vaccines

The intervention that saved the most lives and gets the least credit.

10: briefs
2: subjects
11:53: average
119 min: in total

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science.briefs Science

All 4 in science →

13:00

Smallpox vaccine

In 1796 Edward Jenner tested whether cowpox could protect against smallpox, and the vaccination method that followed eventually let the World Health Organization declare smallpox eradicated in 1980.

13:00

Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin spent thirteen years weakening a tuberculosis strain into the BCG vaccine, first given to a child in 1921, whose protection has since proved real but strikingly inconsistent from one country to the next.

13:00

MMR vaccine and autism

A 1998 study of twelve children claiming a link between MMR vaccine and autism took thirteen years to be formally called fraud, and vaccination rates and measles cases moved in step the whole time.

13:00

Rabies vaccine

In July 1885 Louis Pasteur gave an unlicensed, ethically fraught treatment to a bitten nine-year-old, having claimed far more animal testing than his own lab notebooks later showed he had actually done.

business.briefs Business

All 6 in business →

10:03

Sanofi

Sanofi-Aventis wasn’t built to invent new medicines — it was built to own the ones that already paid.

12:05

Eli Lilly and Company

Eli Lilly · 1875

Eli Lilly and Company is a foundational case in how business infrastructure — not just discovery — creates pharmaceutical power. Its early bets on quality control, prescription gatekeeping, and regulation were deliberate, profitable, and durable. The sources confirm no modern financials or valuations, so analysis must stay anchored in its documented methods and milestones.

11:27

GSK plc

Henry Wellcome · 2000

GSK plc is a British multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company formed in 2000 by the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham. It traces its origins to Henry Wellcome’s 1880 co-founding of Burroughs Wellcome & Company. GSK developed the first malaria vaccine (RTS,S), markets WHO-listed essential medicines, and reported $42.4 billion in revenue and $9.32 billion in earnings in 2025. In 2012, it pleaded guilty in the US to unlawful drug promotion, failure to report safety data, and physician kickbacks — agreeing to a $3 billion settlement, the largest healthcare fraud case in US history and the largest in the pharmaceutical industry. The Wellcome Foundation Ltd., established by Henry Wellcome in 1924, was later sold to GSK following changes in UK charity law.

12:25

Vaccines

science.briefs Science

Smallpox vaccine

BCG vaccine

MMR vaccine and autism

Rabies vaccine

business.briefs Business

Sanofi

Eli Lilly and Company

GSK plc

Moderna

Serum Institute of India

Sinopharm (company)