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Over here, I wanna shot. Why can't the CDC leave this to the market to decide?

I'm with you. If you want a drug, you should be able to get it, but you can thank this country's current WOD's and all the policies that go along with it for your not being able to get the shot that you want.

As to getting the shot, why would you want to? The risk is quite small, in fact at the present you have a greater chance of dying from the vaccination than from the an outbreak of smallpox.

In the 1700s there was an English doctor, J. Edwards, who noticed that milkmaids never got smallpox. Cows had (have?) a similar disease called cowpox. He did not know why, but basically the exposure to cowpox immunized them from smallpox. He went so far as to take pus from a cowpox sore and stick it in a cut on a patient's arm. It worked, but he did not know why.

Time to visit a cattle ranch?

As to getting the shot, why would you want to? The risk is quite small, in fact at the present you have a greater chance of dying from the vaccination than from the an outbreak of smallpox.

That's because there has been no research on making a safer vaccine. The level of saftey of a vaccine used against an extinct disease must be much higher than for and endemic disease. The vaccines that are currenty in storage are made from a strain of vaccina first isolated in New York City in the 1870s. If we are not careful, we could have the same problems with Polio and other diseases that are potential targets for erradication.

As to getting the shot, why would you want to? The risk is quite small, in fact at the present you have a greater chance of dying from the vaccination than from the an outbreak of smallpox.

The risk of dying from natural spread of smallpox is indeed less than the chance of dying from the vaccination. Obviously, he's weighing the chance of a terrorist strike using the disease, in which case the odds change quite a bit. Ring vaccination, given modern travel speeds, is unlikely to work, as I understand it.

However, I have to agree that there is a middle ground between banning the vaccine and a mass inoculation. Let people decide. Heck, if the government wants to encourage it, they can subsidize the price some, or not. Having a percentage of the population immune will actually bring benefits in slowing the transmission of the disease, thus benefitting everyone. And this way, each person gets to decide for themselves whether they think it's worth it.

Drew Garrett