There are at least 4 to 5 million lives that are saved as a result of being vaccinated - year in and year out.
Immunization is one of the most effective, most impactful health interventions in all of human history.
And I'd love to tell you why that is - and about it.
Tens of millions of people, in fact, over the course of human history, hundreds of millions of people died from smallpox.
It was a dreaded disease.
And in the late 1700s was an amazing breakthrough.
A British physician, Jenner, noticed that milkmaids who had been infected, not from smallpox, but from a related virus called cowpox - they were pretty immune from getting smallpox.
And so he used that observation to in fact immunize an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, using the cowpox virus.
And then weeks later, he exposed James Phipps, with of course the permission of his parents, to smallpox and he didn't get sick from smallpox.
And smallpox is a disease we don't have anymore, anywhere in the world.
