[NEBO]

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.

[Paleo Conservative]

The last cases of Smallpox in the US in NYC (1947) and Texas {1949) were connected to travel from Mexico. I'm pretty sure public health officials in Texas were adamant about about vaccination. Even if people are vaccinated, the Smallpox vaccines were only rated for protection against disease for 5-10 years. After that they could still effective at reducing mortality and morbidity. The main thing that widespread childhood vaccination against Smallpox gained was much lower side effects from revaccination in case of an outbreak.

There was an outbreak in Wales, UK in 1962 where there had been long term antivaccine activism since the early 19th century. There were a number of deaths from complications from the emergency vaccination drive. There were a number of Smallpox deaths among hospital workers who should have been vaccinated or revaccinated as part of employment well before the outbreak. Adults are much more likely to have problems with a first Smallpox vaccination than are children. Nowadays the conventional old vaccine would only be used by the general population during a Smallpox emergency. The newer Bavarian-Nordic MVA vaccine is much safer and is the one being used against Monkeypox.