Smallpox Quotations

While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.

The CIA now assesses that four nations - Iraq, North Korea, Russia and, to the surprise of some specialists, France - have undeclared samples of the smallpox virus.

The thing is I think vaccines are one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that we have. I'm a big fan and a great fan of the history of the development of the smallpox vaccine, for example.

Basically, what they're working on here is a smallpox drug. As you know, the vaccine does have a lot of side effects. And this small, tiny basically New York-based company, with its labs out in Oregon, is working on this drug, ... And they just recently announced a contract from the Army -- $1.6 million. It's obviously speculative and somewhere along the line the company is going to have to raise money.

The purpose of this exercise, which was only a drill, was to address the federal government's response to a potential smallpox attack. While there's concern, we do not have any concern that a smallpox attack is imminent.

Our safety experience with smallpox vaccinations to date is consistent with what we expected overall. We have seen a small number of adverse reactions to the vaccine, mostly minor,

The president has made it clear that he was obtaining the smallpox vaccine in his position as commander-in-chief.

To be able to move smallpox simply means to have a device within a writing ink pen that could very easily pass any customs officer, could easily pass through a metal detector, and you could have enough smallpox in there to start the world's worst epidemic.

While there's concern, we do not have any concern that a smallpox attack is imminent.

The reason this vaccination campaign was undertaken was spurious. It was a mirage, there was no threat of smallpox from Iraq. And that remains a powerfully sad coda to this whole episode.

This will bolster our emergency smallpox stockpile, provide an extra layer of protection for all Americans in the event of a smallpox outbreak and strengthen our safety net in the event of a biological attack,

The whole idea is that if we ever had an emergency situation - say it involved smallpox - we would be able, whatever the location, to augment what states could do.

In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.

The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere.

I have read that smallpox is not very communicable at all, and that conditions in which it's spread are usually classified as prolonged, intense contact with an infected individual. Is that true?

There's a lot of people who should not be vaccinated with smallpox vaccine.

Smallpox is natural; vaccine ain't.

They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.

Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.