[annieokie]

Glad you posted. That is exactly what I was thinking, and I bet they were CHEAP too. Got mine as a baby, all my kids got theirs as babies. Then they stopped giving them, about the 1970's?.

WHY? is what I would like to know, it did no harm to have the inoculations, so why stop them.

Want to guess where those inoculations came from, what source, SMALLPOX virus itself. Now they say that is not safe, guess not, cause it don't cost enough.

[Explorer89]

They stopped giving the vaccinations because smallpox no longer exists “in the wild”.

A contract for a smallpox drug? Half a billion dollars worth? Who on earth could it have possibly been tested on? Nobody has had smallpox for years. That passed FDA testing requirements for safety and efficacy? Impossible.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Anytime you do a medical procedure no matter how minor there is a risk. This is especially true with vaccines. People have bad reactions which is why they do the "X chart". At one end it does nothing and is 100% safe because it does nothing at the other end the patient is immune but dead. You want to find the point where those two lines intersect. It leaves the maximum amount of immunity with the minimum amount of acceptable risk.

How large acceptable risk is depends on the death rate of the virus, (Does it kill nine in ten or one in ten million) and how likely it is that you will come in contact with it.

In the case of the smallpox vaccine you had one change in one hundred thousand of having a life threatening reaction and a two in a million chance of dying. That is really good odds except if there is no chance of you catching the virus in the wild. In which case it is easy to argue that you killed them for no reason.

That is the reason they stopped giving the vaccine.