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Witness History: The fastest vaccine ever developed

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24/07/2020 GMT

The fastest vaccine ever developed

BBC World Service - Witness History, The fastest vaccine ever developed

How a five-year-old girl helped her father create a record-breaking vaccine

In the 1960s a five-year-old girl got ill and helped her father create a record-breaking vaccine for mumps.

In the 1960s five-year-old Jeryl Lynn Hilleman got ill with mumps. Her father Dr Maurice Hilleman took a swab from the back of her throat and used it to help create a vaccine for the disease - more quickly than any previous vaccine had ever been completed. During his decades long career Dr Hilleman worked on vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis and meningitis.

Photo: Jeryl Lynn Hilleman with her sister, Kirsten, in 1966 as a doctor gave her the mumps vaccine developed by their father Maurice Hilleman. Courtesy of Merck.

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