 Welcome to Spotlight. I'm Adam Navas. And I'm Liz Wade. Spotlight uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand no matter where in the world they live. It is the year 1803. A four-year-old boy is on a boat. He is doing an important job. He is helping to bring a virus from Spain to Central America. There the virus will protect people from an even worse disease. This is one of the first times a vaccine will be traveling across an ocean. And this boy is carrying the vaccine in his own body. In the past, vaccines were transported like this. Today, we have better technology. But health experts still struggle to send important vaccines to the farthest places on Earth. Today's spotlight is on the ways people transport vaccines around the world. Vaccines are a kind of medicine. They protect people against deadly diseases. The first vaccine was for the terrible disease smallpox. In some parts of the world, half of the people who got sick with smallpox died. But doctors in Europe had found a way to protect people from getting smallpox. They infected people with a similar virus called cowpox. Cowpox did not make people as sick. When they got better from cowpox, their bodies knew how to protect them from getting the smallpox virus too. In the 1800s, doctors took fluid from the cowpox on one person. Then they injected the fluid into another person. Soon, whole villages of people in Europe were safe from smallpox. But across the ocean, many people were still dying from smallpox. Doctors wanted to bring the cowpox virus to these places. They needed a way to transport the cowpox virus a very far distance. So, Spanish doctors took 22 young boys on a long trip to Central America. These boys were orphans who had no parents. They were between 3 and 10 years old. Before the trip began, doctors infected two of the boys with cowpox. Every 10 days of the trip, doctors took fluid from the infected boys' cowpox. Then they infected the next two boys. By the time the boys reached Central America, only one of them had a spot of cowpox left on his body. But that was enough. People celebrated the boys for bringing cowpox to protect them. Happy crowds cheered with bells. The boys were placed with new families. They were promised a good education. Because of these boys, as many as 12,000 people were protected from smallpox in just two months in this area. From there, the vaccine could spread into the wider Americas. But today we wonder about these boys. Did they want to help in this way? Did they get to decide? Probably not. Some were too young to even understand what was happening to them. But because of these boys, many lives were saved. Authorities can transport vaccines in much better ways today. Scientists and doctors have learned a lot since the 1800s. But again, we must send a very important vaccine all around the world. Today, people in every country need the COVID-19 vaccine. How will we transport vaccines for COVID-19 to parts of the world that are hard to reach? Transporting the COVID-19 vaccines is challenging. The vaccines must be kept very cold. There are parts of West and Central Africa where people do not always have electricity. UNICEF is working to set up new refrigerators there. Solar power from the sun will help to keep these refrigerators cold. Jean-Cedric Meyes works for UNICEF. He says... West and Central Africa is one of the most complex places you will find. We are transporting COVID-19 vaccines to major cities. But we must also deliver them to very remote villages. We found that there was not enough cold storage. Then we set about building almost 20,000 solar-powered refrigerators all the way from the coast to the forests. Robin Nandy also works for UNICEF. He explains that they will use many forms of transportation to get the vaccines where they need to go. COVID vaccines will travel by boat to small islands and to villages along the Amazon River. Snowmobiles will have to transport vaccines in winter conditions to parts of Alaska that are very far away. Nandy imagines vaccines will travel by motorcycle, drone, elephant, horse and even camel. He explains... This has never happened before. We are trying to send a new vaccine to every country in the world in the same year. Some far away island countries have no reported cases of COVID yet. But it is still important to get the vaccine to the people there. These communities may have fewer medical resources. If someone there gets COVID-19, the disease could spread very quickly. Authorities may even start using drones to transport vaccines to hard-to-reach parts of the world. These small machines can be controlled from a far distance. Drones can reach places like rural India. Maz Siddiqui works for Gavi, the Global Vaccine Alliance. He explained to the Thomas Reuters Foundation... Every single COVID-19 vaccine is so important. That is why it is necessary to make sure that countries have the support and tools to transport vaccines quickly and well to those who need them. Drones help us by adding another kind of transportation. They are a special solution to a problem faced by many countries. Transporting vaccines has often been difficult. Little boys once sailed across the ocean. Today, drones fly with no pilot at all. People have always needed to be creative to send vaccines across long distances. And they will need to continue to be creative today. By early August 2021, almost 15% of the world's population had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. And health experts were giving over 38 million doses of the vaccine each day. But there is still a lot of work to do to get these vaccines everywhere they need to go. Is a COVID-19 vaccine easy to get where you live? Are organizations doing enough to get it to you? Tell us what you think. Be sure to also check out our other programs about vaccines on YouTube. You can email us at contact at spotlightenglish.com. You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The writer of this program was Megan Nolette. The producer was Michio Ozaki. The voices you heard were from the United States and the United Kingdom. All quotes were adapted for this program and voiced by Spotlight. You can listen to this program again and read it on the internet at www.spotlightenglish.com. This program is called Sending COVID-19 Vaccines Around the World. Visit our website to download our free official app for Android and Apple devices. We hope you can join us again for the next Spotlight program. Goodbye!