Being cynical, you could say this was before the internet - if we tried something similar today, no doubt the few people in the world with conspiracy theories a

Being cynical, you could say this was before the internet - if we tried something similar today, no doubt the few people in the world with conspiracy theories about the small pox vaccine would find each other on some shadowy crackpot forum, start a facebook group, make a professional looking pseudoscientific website, find an ageing B celebrity to endorse them, make an extreme video that starts appearing in algorithmic feeds, launch a facebook ad campaign targeting both the anti-establishment left and conspiracy laden alt-right, get endorsed on twitter by Trump and other populists, crowdfund some junk science research that gets published in a predatory journal (hopefully not the Lancet again) and sooner or later the chance to eradicate small pox is lost. We may have hit peak future, and are now heading down the other side...