Currently Israeli scientists are among those working to produce a treatment or vaccine for the coronavirus; over a century ago it was a Jew named Waldemar (a/k/a Mordechai Wolff) Haffkine who was performing cutting-edge research on how to treat the most dangerous epidemics. Born in Russia in 1860, Haffkine apprenticed himself to Louis Pasteur. Udi Edery tells his story:
Haffkine . . . after tireless research, managed to develop a cholera vaccine based on attenuated bacteria. People may have been dying in masses of a rampant pandemic, but no one stepped up to support Haffkine’s research. He decided to take a drastic step . . . to prove the vaccine’s credibility: he picked up a syringe full of an attenuated strain of cholera, inserted the needle into his arm, and injected the disease straight into his bloodstream.
Although this trial was successful, Haffkine failed to convince the French authorities or medical establishment to get on board. Britain, by contrast, was eager to stop the cholera outbreaks ravaging India, and sent Haffkine to Bangladesh to administer inoculations there. But this wasn’t the end of Haffkine’s success:
An outbreak of another disease, the bubonic plague in Bombay, impelled the Indian authorities to turn to Haffkine again to help them find a vaccine. In January 1897, after three months of intensive work, Haffkine once again inoculated himself with an experimental vaccine for the plague. [It] worked. Haffkine very quickly started to experiment on other people.
In 1902, Haffkine arrived at the village of Mulkowal in order to inoculate the villagers. Several days after the treatment was given, nineteen villagers died from tetanus. Accusatory fingers immediately pointed at Haffkine, with complaints emerging that something had gone wrong with one of the vaccine bottles.
Rumor spread like wildfire that the vaccine was infected with tetanus. A commission of inquiry was appointed which found Haffkine guilty. Soon after, he was deported back to England in shame. The episode came to be known as the “Little Dreyfus Affair,” and was accompanied by an air of anti-Semitism, which Haffkine was familiar with from his life in Russia.
Later exonerated, Haffkine retired in 1914, devoting the rest of his life to Jewish and Zionist activism.
Read more on The Librarians: https://blog.nli.org.il/en/haffkine/