I read about parents refusing vaccination for their children, saying they contain mercury, cause autism, aren’t proven, etc. Didn’t such conspiracy theorists exist when they vaccinated against smallpox? How did we manage to get everyone vaccinated? By force? Logic?
They didn’t.
There was an anti-vaccine movement back then: And they were just as misguided and delusional as today’s anti-vaccine movement.
It helps if you’ve actually seen people suffer from smallpox. I seriously doubt that the privileged American anti-vaxers would exist in such numbers if they’d grown up with polio, measles, etc. People my parents’ age just do not get what the hell is wrong with these people, because they saw the effects of these horrible diseases - iron lungs, children born deaf from rubella, people sterile from mumps, in addition to the death toll.
Do I remember correctly that the smallpox vaccine is a “live” vaccine that can be spread to others? So when someone got vaccinated, people close to him/her (family members etc.) also effectively got vaccinated?
You remember correctly. Smallpox vaccine is a live virus vaccine.
You’re thinking of the oral polio vaccine, which is no longer used in the U.S. because immune-compromised people have contracted polio, or a related disease called vaccinia, from contact with someone who’d just had this vaccine. It’s still used in some Third World areas because it’s easier to store, transport, and administer.
Nowadays, we don’t grow up with “shot marks” like they did in the past. I was vaccinated against smallpox but don’t have one of those scars on my arm.
The area where I live recently had a pertussis outbreak, and the county health department was offering the TDap vaccine (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis) for $10 with no income or age restrictions, and it was free for people on Medicaid. 
A TV news crew went there and interviewed a few people, and most of them said they weren’t all that concerned about themselves, but they worked with the public or had contact with children and were concerned about them.
And speaking of tetanus, that disease cannot be eradicated because Clostridium tetani is ubiquitous in soil bacteria all over the world. The one tetanus patient I’ve been responsible for was on a ventilator for a month. Don’t let this happen to you.
The smallpox vaccine is made from a disease called cowpox, which rarely causes serious illness besides a single skin vesicle but is genetically close enough to smallpox to kick off an immune reaction.
IANADoctor, but I don’t think everyone in the world was vaccinated. The smallpox virus requires a human host.
If you can break the chain of infection, it is no longer transmitted.
Unlike smallpox, other diseases such as measles can lie dormant or be carried by those who aren’t infected. This makes it harder to eradicate, if ever.
A question arises, however…if carriers do not exist, how did giving blankets to the Indians spread it, as supposedly happened? Or is this a myth?
That wouldn’t be a carrier, that would be the actual virus.
Ah thanks, it looks like high-enough vaccination rates combined with the special properties of the smallpox virus made it possible. And I was thinking people were more rational in the past.
No, people are just as stupid as ever, but the communication is better:
…And it’s likely a myth anyway. Smallpox infested blankets might have spread the disease, but it was being spread anyway through other contact which would have been even more likely vectors.
There was also no Andrew Wakefield. He almost single-handedly turned anti-vaccination from a marginal idea by a few holdouts into a cottage industry.
Did the fact that we started vaccinating against smallpox over 200 years ago help matters any? Did that make the target smaller and more manageable?
Also, I have the vaccination mark that’s about the size of a dime and looks like a bunch of little pits. How old does that make me? What is the minimum age a person could be who has one of those?
Depends on your definition of myth. There’s no doubt that an order was given to distribute blankets from smallpox victims to Native Americans with the intent of infecting them. Longer article here. Whether the order was carried out seems controversial, and whether or not subsequent outbreaks were actually due to the blankets or propagated by human-human contact through some other path is debatable (and debated). The Centers for Disease Control says it is possible for smallpox to spread that way.
At least one story of deliberate infection seems to have been fabricated.
Smallpox was a very scary disease, with high mortality rates in some outbreaks. One of the last serious threats was in New York City in the 1940s, when an infected American expatriate from Mexico traveled to New York, wound up in the hospital with a raging case of “black” smallpox (variously misdiagnosed by doctors who’d never seen a case) and before dying managed to infect a bunch of other people, mostly unfortunate fellow hospital patients. Due to the resulting alarm, there was a hugely successful vaccination drive in which millions of previously unprotected New Yorkers were immunized (a great account of this, “A Man From Mexico” by Berton Roueche is worth reading).
If there was an outbreak of paralytic polio in the U.S. caused by a traveler(s) from abroad afflicting unvaccinated people, you’d probably see a rush to get immunized. It probably wouldn’t be as encompassing, given people’s predilection towards mistrust of experts and propensity for conspiracy theories (“There isn’t really any polio! It’s just a plot to make money for Big Pharma!”).
Based on Janet Parker’s death, I don’t think it is unreasonable that if the blanket were covered with the contents of a few burst blisters from a smallpox blister that it could be a vector for transmission.
Smallpox has a much higher risk of death than measles, also humans are the only carriers of the disease. You only need to vaccinate enough of the population to create herd immunity and prevent an outbreak from increasing.
In the UK smallpox vaccination of babies was compulsory for a while. This was in the period just after WW II when the population was more used to doing what it was told.
40ish. Routine vaccination was stopped in the States in the early 1970s.