Are they no longer vaccinating people for smallpox?? I was vaccinated for smallpox when I was 5 seems to me if they are letting millions in the country from 3rd world nations they would still be vaccinating for smallpox!!
Routine smallpox vaccination ended in the US 50 years ago!
Smallpox was still going around when I was a kid and wasn’t wiped out world wide until 1980. I didn’t want the scar on my arm. I never got the smallpox vax, nor did my family. No one caught it in our town and we were poor and didn’t travel back then. But I do remember when people moved to our town from Texas, they all had been vaxxed. Seems it came from Mexico.
Smallpox was still going around when I was a kid and wasn’t wiped out world wide until 1980. I didn’t want the scar on my arm. I never got the smallpox vax, nor did my family. No one caught it in our town and we were poor and didn’t travel back then. But I do remember when people moved to our town from Texas, they all had been vaxxed. Seems it came from Mexico.
Civilian vaccination of Smallpox in the US stopped in 1972 after Smallpox was eradicated from the Western Hemisphere in 1970. The vaccine has not been available to civilians in the US since that time. Smallpox was totally eradicated in the wild in October 1977. There was a medical photographer who got Smallpox and died from a biolab leak in Birmingham, UK in 1978. After than incident the WHO requested all stocks of Smallpox samples either be destroyed or sent to labs at Atlanta, GA or Novosibirsk, USSR. WHO declared Smallpox eradicated worldwide in 1980.
There is no way Monkeypox could have spread outside of Africa 30-50 years ago, because so many adults were vaccinated as children or later in military service. There are reasons that Smallpox was chosen as the first disease to be eradicated. It had a high fatality of up to 30%+; it only could be transmitted between humans; it is transmissible only after symptoms start; it is a slow developing disease, and vaccination up to 4 or 5 days after exposure can prevent disease, and the vaccine for it was the most dangerous vaccine in use in the 20th century. Eradication of Smallpox would allow discontinuation of routine vaccination with the most dangerous vaccine ever in modern use.
The West Germans were in the process of developing a safer vaccine against Smallpox in the 1960's using modern techniques for developing vaccines against Measles and other viral diseases when the Smallpox eradication program started. The research conducted in Ankara, Turkey developed a strain of Vaccinia (Cowpox) that was incapable of replication in mammalian cells. It is the basis of the vaccine that is being used against Monkeypox, not the old fashioned vaccine that causes the scar.