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Vaccinations were first trialled in 1796 by Edward Jenner in Berkeley.
Since then they have saved some 500 million lives and they remain the single most effective health intervention -- ever.
The story of their discovery and roll out is interesting because there are many similarities to today's attitudes and doubts about vaccination.
Jenner's cowpox inoculation was so effective that the practice quickly spread -- even though the understanding of immunology at that point in time was not fully able to account for the vaccine's success.
This 'gap' allowed those who did not understand the science and were suspicious of the evidence to spread misinformation and rumour.
They saw it as their moral duty to oppose what they regarded as dangerous and unscientific.
However, the fact that vaccination was overwhelmingly successful, reducing fatality to one to two per cent, meant that Jenner's supporters felt they had a moral obligation of their own to champion the new procedure.
Today we have numerous vaccinations against a variety of nasty infectious diseases which we simply don't see any more (diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps and rubella, meningitis and so on).
As a doctor, I simply don't see these diseases any more.
Yet public doubts have resurfaced about vaccine safety.
This really began when Andrew Wakefield, a doctor in England, wrote a fraudulent research paper claiming that the MMR vaccine gave rise to childhood autism.
Last year, in my GP surgery, I saw my first ever case of measles, and a child died of the disease in Liverpool recently.
The unfounded scare story has caused a drop in vaccination rates to a level that does not now stop the spread of the disease.
Ninety-five per cent of the population need to be covered to provide what is called herd immunity.
During the Covid pandemic, the widespread use of vaccines was used to control the outbreak and allow us all to move on and live normal lives.
It is true that patients can have side effects from vaccines, and some of these were occasionally severe and sometimes fatal.
This is absolutely tragic and my heart goes out to the surviving families of these victims, some of whom I know.
However, following enormous clinical trials, it has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt that far more people benefited from vaccines than had side effects.
The danger is now that fewer people will trust vaccines and these terrible diseases will again spread through the population.
Exposing ourselves to unnecessary health risks is actually a threat to our national security, as dangerous as bioterrorism or industrial espionage.
To properly protect our children (and ourselves), we must convince those with vaccine hesitancy that vaccines are safe and that you are far better off to have a jab than not to.
We must look to science and not be caught up in fanciful and fraudulent claims enabled by those interested in their own political agenda -- at the risk of facilitating something far darker.