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> In the event of an outbreak, the C.D.C. said, “there is enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States.” I wonder whether the CDC has

> In the event of an outbreak, the C.D.C. said, “there is enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States.” I wonder whether the CDC has re-evaluated their scenarios and simulations given the politicization of vaccines during this pandemic.

yosito 5y ago
IIRC, the smallpox vaccine is the one that scars you for life. I bet a lot of people would be afraid of it at first, but a 30% fatality rate is probably high enough to change a lot of antivaxers' minds.
- rectang 5y ago
  I have a smallpox immunization scar on my upper arm. It's about the size of a quarter and not very ugly. It is trivial compared to the disfigurement that typically came with contracting actual smallpox.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    Also, being dead is terrible for your skin, so. And anyway, if everyone has the scar we've all got the same tiny deduction in 'attractiveness,' so it cancels out I guess.
- max-ibel 5y ago
  Yeah, but the scar is fairly small and can be in a place that isn't showing. That would be the least of my concerns ...
- snerbles 5y ago
  Anecdata, but my smallpox vaccine scar is a small, ~1cm spot. The risk of "inadvertent autoinoculation" was my bigger concern - if you touch the site before it's fully healed, you can spread the vaccina virus to other parts of your own body. In rare cases it's been known to cause blindness. Fortunately a Tegaderm dressing kept it contained to my shoulder, but damn did it itch like crazy for those few weeks.
sbierwagen 5y ago
Smallpox is much nastier than COVID. After a few days of the nightly news showing bulldozers pushing piles of bodies into mass graves, I imagine vaccine uptake would be better than our current situation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BitwiseFool 5y ago
Don't take this as a serious analysis, but I can't help but attribute so much anti-covid vaccine mentality to the fact that Covid is NOT a visible disease, and quite frankly, it's lethality is a dice-roll. Perfectly healthy twenty-somethings can be laid-low while retirees can show no symptoms. The disease has to be taken seriously but its variability skews people's perception of it. Smallpox, on the other hand, is absolutely grotesque in comparison. Highly visible and much more lethal. In terms of human perception I think that fear of catching it would overrule the fear of 'the government' or 'the pharmaceutical companies'. It also probably helps that the Smallpox vaccine has been around for a lot longer.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  There's no need to fear the .gov or big pharma when it comes to smallpox because there's no need to trust them in the first place. The smallpox vaccine is old and very well proven.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I'm having trouble getting good stats on it, but it looks like there were a handful of deaths -- maybe, single or low double digits -- that could be directly attributed to the COVID vaccine. The smallpox vaccine, if we had to vaccinate the whole country, could cause some deaths too. This pretty old paper estimates somewhere ~200, I've seen an estimate elsewhere of around ~500, can't get a good source on the second one (probably they are in the same ballpark accounting for error bars and population growth since the '60s). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196911272812205 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196911272812205 Anyway, all this is to say -- there are definitely complaints to be had about big pharma, but the industry is pretty good at managing measurable risks nowadays. I don't know if 'old and well proven' is quite right. They were working with a different set of tradeoffs -- they had worse tech at the time, expectations were lower (and medicine was generally more dangerous)... but obviously, better than getting smallpox!
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      How many deaths would we expect from the injection of a billion “doses” of injected saline solution? I don’t know that that number is zero.

yosito 5y ago

IIRC, the smallpox vaccine is the one that scars you for life. I bet a lot of people would be afraid of it at first, but a 30% fatality rate is probably high enough to change a lot of antivaxers' minds.

rectang 5y ago
I have a smallpox immunization scar on my upper arm. It's about the size of a quarter and not very ugly. It is trivial compared to the disfigurement that typically came with contracting actual smallpox.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  Also, being dead is terrible for your skin, so. And anyway, if everyone has the scar we've all got the same tiny deduction in 'attractiveness,' so it cancels out I guess.
max-ibel 5y ago
Yeah, but the scar is fairly small and can be in a place that isn't showing. That would be the least of my concerns ...
snerbles 5y ago
Anecdata, but my smallpox vaccine scar is a small, ~1cm spot. The risk of "inadvertent autoinoculation" was my bigger concern - if you touch the site before it's fully healed, you can spread the vaccina virus to other parts of your own body. In rare cases it's been known to cause blindness. Fortunately a Tegaderm dressing kept it contained to my shoulder, but damn did it itch like crazy for those few weeks.

sbierwagen 5y ago

Smallpox is much nastier than COVID. After a few days of the nightly news showing bulldozers pushing piles of bodies into mass graves, I imagine vaccine uptake would be better than our current situation.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

BitwiseFool 5y ago

Don't take this as a serious analysis, but I can't help but attribute so much anti-covid vaccine mentality to the fact that Covid is NOT a visible disease, and quite frankly, it's lethality is a dice-roll. Perfectly healthy twenty-somethings can be laid-low while retirees can show no symptoms. The disease has to be taken seriously but its variability skews people's perception of it. Smallpox, on the other hand, is absolutely grotesque in comparison. Highly visible and much more lethal. In terms of human perception I think that fear of catching it would overrule the fear of 'the government' or 'the pharmaceutical companies'. It also probably helps that the Smallpox vaccine has been around for a lot longer.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
There's no need to fear the .gov or big pharma when it comes to smallpox because there's no need to trust them in the first place. The smallpox vaccine is old and very well proven.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  I'm having trouble getting good stats on it, but it looks like there were a handful of deaths -- maybe, single or low double digits -- that could be directly attributed to the COVID vaccine. The smallpox vaccine, if we had to vaccinate the whole country, could cause some deaths too. This pretty old paper estimates somewhere ~200, I've seen an estimate elsewhere of around ~500, can't get a good source on the second one (probably they are in the same ballpark accounting for error bars and population growth since the '60s). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196911272812205 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196911272812205 Anyway, all this is to say -- there are definitely complaints to be had about big pharma, but the industry is pretty good at managing measurable risks nowadays. I don't know if 'old and well proven' is quite right. They were working with a different set of tradeoffs -- they had worse tech at the time, expectations were lower (and medicine was generally more dangerous)... but obviously, better than getting smallpox!
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    How many deaths would we expect from the injection of a billion “doses” of injected saline solution? I don’t know that that number is zero.