Some of medicine’s most important answers arrive by accident. Israel is sitting on the next one.

Some of the most consequential discoveries in medicine arrive not from laboratories but from administrative accidents. A few years ago researchers at Stanford noticed that Wales had rolled out its shingles vaccine using a blunt rule: anyone born on or after a particular date was eligible, anyone born a day earlier was not. Two groups of people, near identical in everything that mattered, divided only by the side of a line they happened to fall on. When the scientists followed them, those offered the vaccine proved measurably less likely to develop dementia in the years that followed. Because the dividing line was arbitrary, the comparison came close to the gold standard of medicine, the randomised trial, without anyone having designed one.

That Welsh accident is one reason a once eccentric idea is now taken seriously. The shingles vaccine, accepted by most people only to avoid a painful rash, may also protect the ageing brain.

The evidence has been arriving from several directions at once. The Welsh result has not stood alone: the same natural experiment, repeated in Australia, returned the same answer, in a country whose dementia research ranks among the world’s most respected, anchored at the Prince of Wales Hospital and the University of New South Wales in Sydney. An Oxford team, sifting through medical records, found that people given the newer recombinant vaccine lived longer without a dementia diagnosis than those given the older formulation. This........

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