10 ms·

I'm guessing that since that specific job sometimes leads to free foreign travel, it's better to be vaccinated for as many things as possible before deployment

• btilly 5y ago
  No, it is that smallpox is a good candidate for a bioweapon, so we want to be sure that our soldiers to be protected against any such bioweapon that an adversary might choose to create. (In fact smallpox was historically used as a bioweapon against Native Americans.) There have been no smallpox cases in decades, so it is not a concern that you might travel somewhere that smallpox is a concern. It would have to be a deliberate attack. Separately if anyone wonders why smallpox is called smallpox, it is to distinguish it from the great pox, which is better known as syphilis. The comparison is disfiguring scars for smallpox, versus things like your nose falling off with syphilis.