Look-Please don't shoot the querant. I asked a proven, factual, historically sound query. WHY DIDN'T UNVACINATED CHILDREN AND IMMUNE COMPROMISE PEOPLE DIE IN THE CENTURY, WHEN SMALLPOX VACINATIONS WERE THE NORM ?
On a personal note, having been vacinated and been given two booster shots, I'm fine and won't need revacination nor additional boosters. That's a fact , BTW.
I think the simple answer to yor question is - some of them did become ill or die. We just were not aware they did. Vaccines were much more dangerous then, and this is an old vaccine. As the article I am going to link to below says, we have just become used to vaccines with less risk than this one has. The reason they have not lined up everyone for these is because it is going to cause some significant problems and they are trying to work out how they will handle those problems in advance.
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>A lot of people think getting the smallpox vaccine "is like going in and getting a flu shot," said Dr. Michael Welch of the Richmond Department of Public Health. "It's not."
There is a short list of who should not get the vaccine, but it could add up to a lot of people. Experts say pregnant women should not. Nor should people with chronic and severe skin infections or those with compromised immune systems from HIV or and organ transplants, for example.
Pre-event vaccinations also could put health-care workers in a bind.
"The area of the vaccination ends up being contagious for a little while," Smithson said. "It can give people vaccinia. Hospitals deal with immunocompromised patients. How do you give it to your staff and then say you cannot be around any immunosuppressed people for 10 days?"
The federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices a few weeks ago came out with a statement that said as long as the vaccination area was covered by a bandage, vaccinated health-care workers would not have to miss work. The recommendations were forwarded to the CDC, which still needs to sign off on them.
Smithson points out that the patient literature that comes with the Dryvax vaccine seems to imply more caution. The precautions say: "Recently vaccinated health-care workers should avoid contact with patients, particularly those with immunodeficiencies, until the scab has separated from the skin at the vaccination site."
It later tells health-care workers what steps to take if contact with patients is "essential and unavoidable."
At a meeting of the Secure Virginia Initiative's health and medical subpanel, one county health official said informal conversations with his staff turned up quite a few people who would not be eligible to get the vaccine or who simply did not want it.
Kaplowitz said the answer may be to consider regional teams instead of teams at individual hospitals or by cities or counties.
"We can't force anybody to take the vaccine, and this will be an issue," Kaplowitz said.
Smithson said public expectations may be against pre-event vaccinations on any large scale. Because vaccines have been made safer over the years, people don't expect any casualties.
"When there were mostly live virus vaccines, over 20 to 30 years ago, there were a certain number who died. Now that we have these vaccines that are much safer, we have not had those bad outcomes," Smithson said. "The American people are used to zero deaths and zero complications. That makes it a little tougher."<
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http://timesdispatch.com/news/vametro/MGBV48GBM8D.html
WHY DIDN'T UNVACINATED CHILDREN AND IMMUNE COMPROMISE PEOPLE DIE IN THE CENTURY, WHEN SMALLPOX VACINATIONS WERE THE NORM ? Some did.
However, we have a more vulnerable population now in that we have a couple generations of immunodeficient chidren who survived and grew up into adulthood ONLY because antibiotics were discovered and helped them survive.
And we have a population of people taking steroids for asthma and COPD, and cancer chemotherapy, and organ transplant recipients. These therapies didn't exist back then and these people would have died of their primary disease.
Finally, one got vaccinated in childhood when the immune system was at its peak and able to respond at maximum to the attenuated virus entering the system. A lot of the people we are going to vaccinate are adults now, who will have a higher rate of ill effects. For the same reason that chicken pox is a more serious disease in adulthood than childhood, it is riskier to vaccinate older people. Remember Patsy Mink?
Thus a higher percentage of people now will be at risk for greater problems than was true in the past.
This is a reality we have to try to cope with and try to minimize as best we can.