Comment by m-hodges

Comment by m-hodges 6 hours ago

1 reply

I don’t think many people know about or remember the 2003 smallpox vaccination campaign.¹

> The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_va...

cucumber3732842 6 hours ago

Nobody in Hn type circles wants to remember it because looking back with hindsight it was clearly just part of the theater to get people wringing their hands about whatever chemical or biological WMDs they alleged Saddam had and they killed the program as so as they got their invasion.

Wikipedia somehow makes it eve worse than that:

"The campaign ended early in June 2003, with only 38,257 civilian health care workers vaccinated, after several hospitals refused to participate due to the risk of the live virus infecting vulnerable patients and skepticism about the risks of an attack, and after over 50 heart complications were reported by the CDC."