Civil-War-era smallpox vaccines were genetically similar, new study finds
Scientists around the world are currently working feverishly to develop an effective vaccine against COVID-19 to curb the global pandemic that has claimed nearly 600,000 human lives worldwide (and counting). Meanwhile, a collaboration between scientists at McMaster University, the University of Sydney, and historians at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, are looking to the past for potential clues. They have analyzed the genome of fragments of the smallpox virus used in vaccines during the Civil War, according to a new paper published in the journal Genome Biology.
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