Smallpox Shots: Medical Stand Courts Disaster

Daily Observer

May 3, 1979

During the past five years this column has inveighed at least twice against the policy, endorsed by medical leaders, in conjunction with government agencies, to discontinue mandatory vaccination of pre-school children against smallpox. In addition proof of vaccination, no longer is required for re-entry into the United States after travel to a foreign country.

My position is based on the following propositions.

· Nature sometimes outwits man, and there is no guarantee that smallpox has been abolished from the face of the earth just because the World Health Organization claims that it is gone, based on the fact that no new cases have been reported over a period of about one year. Workers for WHO performed courageously beyond the call of duty – but this does not guarantee the end of smallpox. Also although evidence suggests that man is the only living host of the smallpox virus, nature is canny and might just find another hiding place.

· If generations grow to adulthood without primary vaccination against smallpox and the disease should suddenly reappear, so that mass vaccination were needed, the mortality amongst huge groups of adults vaccinated for the first time would be much greater, proportionately than with infants vaccinated for the first time under normal circumstances. This is borne out by the figures on vaccination in the 1947 smallpox scare in New York City. The only reason for discontinuing primary vaccination in the young is that it causes about 150 deaths nationally annually. This figure could probably be reduced by screening those to be vaccinated to determine whether their immune systems were competent and perhaps by spot vaccinating.

· Smallpox cannot be considered banished from the face of the earth as long as cultures of live smallpox virus are stashed away at a number or experimental laboratories throughout the world. The presence of these viruses is unnecessary since the anti-smallpox vaccine is made of cowpox virus, a less virulent cousin of the smallpox denizen.

The claims that smallpox has been eliminated were strident and the cheers universal, the scientific conquest was heralded in the press. The plague of smallpox was banished forever from planet Earth. There was only one catch. Some virus escaped from an experimental laboratory in Birmingham England and killed one person. So the pox may be loose again.

Smallpox when rampaging has a death rate between 20 and 50 percent and higher in some instances. Certainly it is a dangerous disease. We know how to protect against it. It seems imprudent to eliminate the vaccination before we are even certain that there is no virus whatsoever left anywhere on earth; and certainly it is ridiculous to leave our population unprotected as long as there is live virus in the laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control; in Atlanta Georgia.

No matter the precautions, there will always be mortality and morbidity from public health measures. Aspirin kills and so does penicillin. But the death rate from medications is paltry compared to the good they do. The risk-benefit ration for anti-smallpox vaccination in children is equally small.

There seems a peculiar nostalgia among scientists that prevents them from ridding their laboratories of lethal virus for once and for all. And until this is done we must continue to vaccinate as heretofore until no less than ten years has passed without a case on earth. Even today the paltry use of vaccine has discouraged its manufacture and it is sometimes hard to get.. Soon it may become unavailable, and serious delays might be encountered in manufacturing fresh supplies of vaccine if an emergency arose. To cease vaccination prior to the eradication of the smallpox virus is to court disaster for unprotected generations of Americans, indeed the whole world.