Smallpox vaccine is not based on cowpox. It uses a different virus.
That doesn't concur with anything I've read, nor statements from some of the FReeper docs in this forum.
Gotta source for that?
The article implied it would be pretty easy to make a bunch of cowpox and use that to protect against smallpox in the absence of special-purpose vaccine, but that cowpox wouldn't work as well as the special-purpose vaccine designed for use against smallpox.
I looked in the article for where you took this inference, and I'm guessing this is it...
Perhaps one in a million will die from vaccination, while more will be disabled. Newer vaccines are safer. Rapid production of less effective vaccine using raw cowpox might be possible, but distribution in undeveloped countries during a world epidemic is problematic.
I don't believe this is saying that the newer vaccines aren't cowpox-based, just that they're a safer form of it. The distinction being made is between cowpox-based vaccines and raw cowpox inoculation.
Here's a source:
www.bbc.co.uk/science/hottopics/smallpox/vaccine.shtml
"In 1939, British scientist Allan Downie discovered that the smallpox vaccine widely in use was not cowpox as everyone had thought, but another type of 'orthopoxvirus'. It came to be called vaccinia virus. The origin of this virus, and whether it had been accidentally created in the laboratory or had existed in nature, is unknown."
The distinction you are drawing is probably irrelevant. The issue is the level of similarity in the coating of the virus. Without giving you a lecture on viral molecular biology, the similarity between small pox and vaccinia is likely related to similarity in the coating surrounding the two viruses.
Your comments are really timely given the recent publication of a scientific paper where the researchers created a functional polio virus from published gene sequences. The publication was misguided and alot like publishing nuclear weapon blueprints. Our National Academy of Sciences should have had more insight.
Your concern that a vaccine may not function well against bioweapons is valid, but it is wiser to vaccinate against known viruses than to simply ignore the threat.