It’s easy! Large scale vaccination of civilian populations around the world against Smallpox ended even before the total eradication of Smallpox in 1977. Nowadays only militaries are vaccinated against Smallpox as a prevention of use of Smallpox as a bioweapon. Most of the world’s population has no immunity to orthopox viruses like Smallpox and Monkeypox. Now that it has been almost 45 years since the total eradication of Smallpox, the world’s population is quite vulnerable to previously obscure varieties of orthopoxes. Mix in an even larger scale civilian air transport system that can get people from just about any spot in the world to any other spot in the world in under 24 hours, and you have perfect conditions for the emergence of a new orthopox virus.
Contrary to the author’s assertion of high rates of mutation of pathogens, orthopox viruses have low rates of mutations, because they are DNA viruses not RNA viruses like COVID-19 and HIV. That’s why the Cowpox virus and it’s descendants are very effective at immunizing against all orthopox viruses not just Smallpox.
After the eradication of Smallpox, the FDA and WHO wanted to ban vaccination of civilian populations against Smallpox in order to prevent use of Smallpox as a bioweapon. That’s why it’s almost impossible to get access to Smallpox vaccines that are very effective against Monkeypox. What’s needed is some relaxation of restrictions, so people traveling to or from parts of Africa where there have been Monkeypox outbreaks, can get vaccinated. There are newer and much safer Smallpox vaccines that are available.
https://www.bavarian-nordic.com/pipeline/mva-bn.aspx
Several years ago in the Gold Clinic at the Blanch field Army hospital forced me to get the shot, which turned out that I did get the disease. They had to give me medicine to get rid of the itching. You can imagine I was at the stupid doctor