Why Mass Smallpox Vaccination Was Ruled Out

Since smallpox, as effective a vaccine as it is, has some rare but nonetheless potentially very serious toxic side effects. If you're immunosuppressed, it could be deadly. Uh, if you're one of those people who have the, the strange myocarditis associated with it.

So even though we accepted the toxicities of the smallpox vaccine back then, it was because there was active smallpox out there. So then we decided that we would not globally vaccinate the entire country.

And by the way, the country would not have accepted being vaccinated.

So we knew that. I mean, it was sort of like a fail-safe. And I said, "Mr.

Vice President, by the way, even when you're offering it to the first responders, many of them didn't wanna take." So this idea about kind of saying everybody should take it, m- it didn't make any sense