Nice to get a qualified opposing viewpoint. Perhaps you would be so kind as to comment on the quotes in #16. Also, and although it would be nice if it were strictly a rhetorical question, where is the line? There are some problems with the Vaccine-of-the-Week approach to all potential threats. And why, if smallpox was reduced to two carefully controlled stocks, does it now pose such a threat?
I do agree that it all depends on threat assessment, and if I thought it was zero, I would not favor voluntary vaccination.
But I don't think it is zero, and neither do the authorities who are funding a crash program to develop a new vaccine and to produce 300 million doses.
I think the POV that the threat is low to nonexistent is not data based-I think it is based on wishful thinking, and the wish to maintain the fiction that smallpox was "eradicated" in 1977.
Of course it was not eradicated, and there is a good reason that the two cold war antagonists were permitted by treaty to keep it alive-because of its enormous military potential. According to the same treaty, we are supposed to destroy our stocks this very year.
Do you think this is a good idea?
Do you think the experiment of creating the largest virgin population for smallpox in world history (a/k/a our children) was a good plan with retained stocks of variola in the USSR?
Do you think that taking the threat off the table by vaccinating the US population would be stabilizing, or destabilizing?