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50 free Vaccine trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This vaccine trivia quiz covers the medical technology that has saved more lives than almost any other. The easy questions handle the basics: what a vaccine does, why the word comes from cows, who Edward Jenner was, which disease has been eradicated and what herd immunity means. The harder end goes into the science and the history: variolation in China and Turkey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Newgate prisoners, the 1804 arm-to-arm expedition to the Spanish colonies, Pasteur's chicken cholera and anthrax vaccines, attenuated versus inactivated versus toxoid versus subunit vaccines, why the polio vaccine's serotype 2 had to be reduced, thiomersal, egg-grown flu shots, the DIVA vaccines used on pigs, the mRNA pioneers, and the three countries where polio still lingers. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our medicine, medical history and human body quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What kind of protection does a vaccine provide?
Active acquired immunity
The immune system learns to recognise the agent as a threat and destroys the real pathogen when it turns up later.
Q 02The words 'vaccine' and 'vaccination' derive from the Latin for smallpox of which animal?
The cow
Edward Jenner coined Variolae vaccinae for cowpox in 1798, and the term was later extended to all such inoculations.
Q 03What is the science of vaccine development and production called?
Vaccinology
Smallpox was the first disease for which a vaccine was ever produced, and the first to be eradicated by one.
Q 04For how many preventable infections does the WHO say licensed vaccines are available?
Twenty-five
Vaccines remain elusive for others, including herpes simplex, malaria, gonorrhoea and HIV.
Q 05Who brought the folk practice of smallpox inoculation from Turkey to Britain in 1721?
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
She had her four-year-old daughter variolated in front of royal physicians on her return to England.
Q 06In which country was inoculation against smallpox first recorded, in the 16th century?
China
Practitioners blew powdered smallpox scabs up the nostrils, a method called nasal insufflation.
Q 07What was the deliberate infection with smallpox material to prevent severe disease called?
Variolation
Far riskier than Jenner's cowpox method, it was banned in England in 1840.
Q 08In 1721, Charles Maitland tested smallpox inoculation on six prisoners at which London prison?
Newgate
The experiment succeeded and the royal family soon promoted the procedure.
Q 09Which son of George III died in 1783 several days after being inoculated against smallpox?
Prince Octavius
He was a son of George III; the death was a blow to the practice's royal backing.
Q 10In 1796, Edward Jenner scratched cowpox pus from a milkmaid's hand into the arm of which 8-year-old boy?
James Phipps
Six weeks later he variolated the boy with smallpox and observed that he did not catch it.
Q 11The 1804 Balmis expedition carried smallpox vaccine to Spain's colonies using what method?
Arm-to-arm transfer between carriers
The vaccine survived only 12 days outside a body, so it was passed from person to person on the voyage to Mexico and the Philippines.
Q 12Who developed the second generation of vaccines in the 1880s, against chicken cholera and anthrax?
Louis Pasteur
From then on, vaccines became a matter of national prestige and compulsory vaccination laws followed.
Q 13What is the effect whereby a highly vaccinated population makes outbreaks unlikely even for the unvaccinated?
Herd immunity
Q 21Conjugate vaccines link a bacterium's outer coat to a carrier molecule. Which vaccine uses this?
Haemophilus influenzae type B
The trick fools the immune system into treating the polysaccharide as if it were a protein antigen.
Q 22The BCG tuberculosis vaccine is made from which bacterium?
Mycobacterium bovis
It is a 'Jennerian' vaccine, using a related animal pathogen the way Jenner used cowpox.
Q 23Which two scientists won Columbia's Horwitz Prize in 2021 for pioneering mRNA vaccine technology?
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
It is why measles, mumps, rubella and polio are nowhere near as common as a century ago.
Q 14In 2015, endemic wild poliovirus remained in parts of which three countries?
Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan
Polio spreads only among humans, so eradication is possible; Nigeria was declared free of wild polio in 2020, leaving Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Q 15How many measles cases were recorded in the United States in 1958, before the vaccine?
763,094
After vaccination the number fell to fewer than 150 a year; the vaccine is estimated to prevent a million deaths worldwide annually.
Q 16Roughly what proportion of people fail to respond to a vaccine for host-related reasons like genetics?
About 2 to 10%
Older people also respond less strongly, a pattern called immunosenescence.
Q 17Adaptive immunity after vaccination takes roughly how long to fully develop?
1 to 2 weeks
Innate immunity can switch on in as little as twelve hours, but the host can still be infected during the gap.
Q 18Which type of vaccine uses live microorganisms cultivated to lose their virulence?
Attenuated
Yellow fever, measles, mumps, rubella and BCG are examples; they give durable immunity but can be unsafe for the immunocompromised.
Q 19Tetanus and diphtheria vaccines are made from inactivated bacterial poisons. What are they called?
Toxoid
A rattlesnake-venom toxoid is even used to vaccinate dogs against bites.
Q 20The hepatitis B vaccine, made only from the virus's surface proteins, is an example of which type?
Subunit
The proteins were once extracted from patients' blood serum but are now made by putting the viral gene into yeast.
mRNA vaccines such as BNT162b2 were developed in 2020 with the help of Operation Warp Speed.
Q 24mRNA vaccines package the RNA inside what?
Lipid nanoparticles
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are the best-known examples.
Q 25Which viruses have been used as carriers for viral vector vaccines?
Adenovirus, vaccinia virus and VSV
A safe virus smuggles in the pathogen's genes so the body makes the antigen itself.
Q 26What is a vaccine designed to immunise against a single antigen or microorganism called?
Monovalent
Multivalent shots cover several strains or germs; prefixes such as trivalent and quadrivalent give the count.
Q 27In the trivalent Sabin polio vaccine, which serotype had to be reduced because it suppressed the others?
Type 2
The doses of serotypes 1 and 3 were increased in the early 1960s to fix the interference.
Q 28What is the name for a substance added to a vaccine to boost the immune response?
An adjuvant
The tetanus vaccine, for example, is usually adsorbed onto alum for a stronger effect.
Q 29Which vaccine was paired with anthrax vaccine before the 1990 Gulf campaign to speed immunity?
Whole-cell pertussis
A faster response matters when exposure might be imminent.
Q 30Which mercury-containing preservative was removed from most childhood vaccines as a precaution?
Thiomersal
A multi-dose flu shot now carries less than a microgram of mercury, about the same as ten grams of canned tuna.