At 02:53 PM 09/26/2001 +0800, F. Marc de Piolenc wrote:
Smallpox is officially "eradicated," per the UN. Not only are you not forced to get vaccinated - the vaccine is no longer available. This would be okay if there were no more reservoirs of the disease, but in fact the virus is preserved at several locations, and could be released either by accident or by design.
There are two large terrorist organizations that have smallpox supplies - the US* and Russian military biological warfare groups - and there are occasional rumors that other terrorists may also have them. Each of the big terrorist groups claims that they need to keep the stuff so that they can prepare vaccines in case the other side uses their stash for CBW, and that they can't do a mutual disarmament because they can't trust each other not to keep some hidden stash - plus the possibility that some other terrorist group may have some, or that there may be some in the wild that could reappear some day and we'd then be defenseless. This is especially bogus for smallpox, because (as Jenner discovered), cowpox is usable as a vaccine against smallpox, so keeping that should be good enough, though the smallpox-based vaccines are more convenient. There's a certain amount of counter-argument that says that the other terrorists might have done some genetic engineering to create a mutant smallpox that isn't bothered by cowpox immunity, and therefore they need to keep the Genuine Bad Stuff around. [*Technically the US probably uses the Center for Disease Control to run the repository, but it's the basically the military's control here.]