It would take far too long to explain the historical context for . That part of the world has been a flashpoint for many wars because of its geographic location and the people fighting for it. It is true now, and it was true in 1881, when a young man named Waldemar Mordecai Wolff Haffkine was born. Waldemar was born in 1860 to Aaron and Rosalie Chavkin ("Chavkin" is the Russian name for "Haffkine"). He went to the University of Odessa at age 19, and while there, he encountered the Russians.
Russian Tacit Approval of Anti-Semitism in Russian Ukraine
At the time, Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, and These pogroms were acts of violence perpetrated against Jewish inhabitants of the region, often with tacit approval of the government. Before absorbing Ukraine into the empire, Russia did not have much Jewish population. Once Ukraine and other former territories of the Ottoman Empire were annexed, the Russian government sought to remove Jews from its territories by different means. Allowing pogroms to happen, often without intervening and without prosecuting those responsible, was one way of ethnically cleansing Ukraine. (.)
One such pogrom occurred in Odessa in 1881. Waldemar served in the Odessa League of Self Defence, a civic group organized to protect the Jewish community from violence. During the Odessa pogrom of 1881, Waldemar was injured and imprisoned. His university mentor, , helped Waldemar avoid prison. Instead, Waldemar became a candidate for a doctoral degree in science, which he successfully earned in 1884. Because of his Jewish heritage, Dr. Haffkine was not allowed to be a professor at the local university, so he traveled to Paris with Professor Metchnikoff to work at the Pasteur Institute.
India By Way of Paris
At the Pasteur Institute, Haffkine worked on perfecting and making it suitable for use in humans. His vaccine showed some promise, but he needed to test it in human populations during an outbreak to show its efficacy in a scientific trial with human subjects. This attracted the attention of the British government. At the time, Britain colonized India, and numerous waves of cholera epidemics swept over India during the rainy seasons. At the invitation of the British, Haffkine traveled to India to test his vaccine in 1893.
Dr. Haffkine and his team first vaccinated British and Indian troops. Then, as word spread that the cholera epidemics were less severe in the troops, local governments began requesting help. That was the case in Calcutta (modern day Kolkata), where an epidemic in the suburbs was used as the first field trial of Haffkine's vaccine. From March 1894 to August 1895, records were kept on who was vaccinated and who was not, and who got sick from cholera and who did not. In the end, the attack rate (number sick divided by number exposed) in the unvaccinated was 13.4% (45/335) and 2.2% (4/181) in the vaccinated. Deemed a success, in that trial and in other instances where the vaccine was administered, more and more requests for the vaccine were made.
While in Europe to recover from malaria, Haffkine presented his findings to professional organizations. He kept meticulous records based on censuses taken by the British. (It wouldn't be until 1915 that statisticians would confirm the statistical significance of Haffkine's findings.) His stay in Europe was short-lived. An epidemic of plague (Yersinia pestis) had arrived in India from Hong Kong, and Haffkine was pressed into service. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1896 and would remain with the service for 20 years until his retirement in 1915.
While in the Indian Civil Service, Haffkine developed a vaccine against plague (a bacteria carried by fleas in rodents). The epidemic of plague was brutal to the people of India, so much so that the Spanish flu pandemic further decimated their population in 1918. It was also during that plague epidemic that the British government issued the first "vaccine passports" to people who received Haffkine's plague vaccine. Haffkine was so sure of his vaccine that he had it injected into him at a higher dose than what the people would receive. He reported pain at the injection site and two days of fever and malaise, but nothing after that.
At a prison in Bombay (modern day Mumbai), 154 prisoners volunteered to be vaccinated during an active outbreak among the incarcerated. Three of those vaccinated died that day, as they were already showing signs of the disease. Over the following week, none of the rest of the vaccinated died. Among the unvaccinated, three died on the day of the vaccination of the others, and another six died in the following week. Based on these observations, the vaccine was deemed a success, and it was given to 11,000 people in the following months.
Because of his work in India, Queen Victoria named him a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) in 1897. That would be one of many accolades Haffkine would receive in his lifetime in Europe and India. But one incident would stop his work for many years.
A Tetanus Accident and Haffkine's Reputation
In 1902, about 100 people were vaccinated in Punjab province. An investigation showed that all six had received a vaccine from one vial of the vaccination. (Again, Haffkine and his colleagues kept meticulous records.) The investigation also showed that the laboratory under Haffkine's supervision had done away with treating the vaccine preparation with carbolic acid (an antiseptic) in favor of sterilization of the water by heat, something Haffkine had learned to do in Paris at the Pasteur Institute. After much discussion in scientific circles, and then the press and the public, it was explained that contamination of the one bottle may have happened in the field, not in the laboratory. (At this time, understanding how bacterial contamination of vaccine vials worked was elusive.)
Nevertheless, Haffkine's reputation suffered a setback, and it would not be until 1907 that the full extent of what happened was finally clarified. Haffkine was found not to have been at fault, and his scientific reputation began to come back. But the damage was done. Less and less people in India trusted the vaccines over that one incident and the attention it received. Dr. Haffkine continued his work until his retirement from the civil service in 1915.
Dr. Waldemar Haffkine's Legacy
After 1915, Haffkine lived in France with his sister. He returned to his native Ukraine in the mid 1920s, but he did not recognize it after being gone for almost 40 years. By then, Russia was the Soviet Union, and idolization of all things Communism was the norm. There were still Jewish communities in the region, mostly involved in farming. Seeking to help young Jewish men like he once was, Haffkine donated heavily to what became the Haffkine Foundation for the Benefit of Yeshivoth (Jewish educational institutions). Back in India, the laboratory he directed in Mumbai became the Haffkine Institute, an institute still working today on vaccines and other ways of improving the lives of the people of India.
A young Jewish man persecuted by the Russians who had to live in exile from his native land of Ukraine grew up to become one of the giants of vaccine science., "a Ukraine Jew, trained in the schools of European science, saves the lives of Hindus and Mohammedans and is decorated by the descendant of William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great." The sun has not set on his work ever since, as his techniques for attenuation of bacteria, the laboratory he directed, and some of the schools he funded are still operational today. Over the next weeks or months, we will witness much suffering from the violence brought to Ukraine by the Russian armed forces. It is not the first time it has happened, and maybe -- just maybe -- some good will come out of it like it has in the past.
References
Barbara J. Hawgood, "Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, CIE (1860–1930): Prophylactic
Vaccination Against Cholera and Bubonic Plague in British India,"
[https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/wp-data/uploads/2011/08/HaffkinePublished.pdf]
Journal of Medical Biography 15:1 (2007), 9-19.
Natasha Sarkar, "Plague in Bombay: Response of Britain's Indian Subjects to Colonial Intervention," Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 62 (2001), 442-449.