Getting vaccinated for a pox

When I first read about the current vaccine for protection against COVID-19, I twisted my neck to look in the mirror at my right shoulder. That’s where, when I was 6 years old, I was vaccinated to prevent smallpox.

Children couldn’t start school without that vaccination in those days. As I got older, I occasionally looked at the scar, the size and shape of a dime.

It seems to be gone now. (So are a lot of things when you get old.)

There were two kinds of smallpox. The strongest kind hit 90 percent of the victims, and a third of them died. It’s an airborne virus, and there’s no cure. But the medical industry tells us that vaccination has wiped it out.

I did some digging into Philly’s medical past, and came upon the name of Dr. A. A. Cairns, who became Philadelphia’s “chief medical inspector” in 1904. He was a believer in vaccination, unlike many doctors of the era.

In 1910, he caused a fuss by leading a team of like-thinking doctors to vaccinate 700 people on a ship in the port before they were allowed to enter the city, because there had been an outbreak of smallpox on the ship.

Again in 1923, Dr. Cairns learned that a smallpox patient had attended a local church. He went to the church with a police force and demanded that the congregation be vaccinated. In all, 3,500 residents of northeast Philadelphia received the smallpox vaccine during the 1923 outbreak.

When 183 cases of smallpox and 23 deaths were reported in Philadelphia from Jan. 1 to June 30, 1925, the Department of Public Health established police-enforced quarantines throughout the city. The number of people getting smallpox vaccine increased, and those who refused were subject to police-enforced quarantine for a maximum of 18 days.

In April 1925, Dr. Cairns met with Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick to request more funding and staffing, and left with a plan which resulted in about 200,000 people being vaccinated by the Department of Public Health, and another 300,000 by hospitals, institutions, industrial plants, or their own physicians.

It seems that there is still no known cure for smallpox, but worldwide vaccination programs prevent it.

The last known outbreak of smallpox in the United States was in 1949, in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. There were many victims, and one woman died.

The last known case is said to have occurred in 1977 in Somalia. In 1980, the World Health Organization pronounced smallpox as completely eradicated.

But just in case you have some doubts, I tried to look up the symptoms of smallpox so you can watch out for it.

The first description of smallpox said that when people are infected with the smallpox virus, they have no symptoms for between seven and 17 days. If you figure out how to know when not having symptoms is a symptom, let me know.

After that, you get chills, fever, headache, back pain, abdominal pain and vomiting. That stops for two or three days, and then you get a rash and abscesses all over your body.

It seems that there’s nothing small about it, and no pox. I’m glad I was a kid when we only got vaccinated for a small pox.