Everyone in the world is waiting for a vaccine for obvious reasons – no one wants to die from COVID-19.

As it stands now, there are 23 companies that are working on coronavirus treatments or vaccines. One of them, Israeli Bio-Defense Lab announced on May 5th, 2020 that it found an “antibody that neutralizes” the coronavirus. Those companies better rush, since our daughter, who is expecting her first baby in the beginning of September, informed us that we will probably have to wait until there’s a vaccination before we can meet our granddaughter. There have been cures for plagues for over 3,300 years. The Torah describes a plague, which struck the children of Israel who started sinning in the desert after their exodus from Egypt, and thousands began to die. Moses told Aaron to quickly take a firepan with incense (a ketoret) to go into the middle of the congregation and atone for their sins. “He stood between the dead and the living, and the plague was checked. Those who died from the plague were fourteen thousand seven hundred.” (Numbers 17:13-14) But what was the incense called ketoret, and how did Moses know about this miracle cure? According to the folklore story, when Moses had ascended to heaven to receive the Torah, the Angel of Death, whose name was Satan, taught him the secret.

In 1796, Edward Jenner, a general practitioner from rural England, theorized that cowpox built one’s immunity to smallpox. He extracted a cowpox-infected lymph from a cow and inserted a small amount into the arm of an eight-year-old boy. Seven weeks later, Jenner injected a boy with smallpox. His immune system responded positively. This discovery led to the birth of the science of immunology. Vaccinations became a reality. The word is derived from the Latin vaccinus, meaning “of the cow”.