From the very first ideas about vaccinations, there have been anti-science people who have touched on many of the same themes as such people use today today. This question just has an incorrect grasp of historical events.

There were riots against smallpox vaccines. Smallpox vaccine was the first vaccine. It was very safe and effective. Many of that same sorts of arguments were made in the late 1800s (3 generations after smallpox vaccines were show to be safe and effective) as are being made today. The antivaxers in the late 19th century had ideas from all sorts of angles: sanitary, religious, scientific, and political. Some said smallpox was not really passed from person to person. In other words they said the cause of the disease was “fake news”. They had not evidence for this, just like otday. Some said using material from cows was unhealthy or maybe un-Christian, and was using matter from lower creatures. The biggest group did not like being told what to do. Just like today, they wanted “Freedom”. The equivalent of social media at the time was quickly produced pamphlets that were given out on the street at a time when everyone was on the street everyday. Ones were made with titles like "Vaccination: its fallacies and evils", "Vaccination, a Curse" and the "Horrors of Vaccination". Just as today people protested and endangered others.

Anti-vaccination nut cases are as old as vaccinations. Even older. In the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721–22 some people like Cotton Mather promoted variolation. This was using scabs or pus form smallpox to inoculate people. It was more dangerous than later vaccination and it could kill people, but it saved many more than it killed. People tried to fire bombed Cotton Mather’s home. Attached to the bomb, which did not go off was this note “ “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you! I’ll inoculate you with this; with a pox to you.’’

Some people fought smallpox vaccine even after 100 years of safe vaccinations. This was even though it was well know to be a horrific and painful way to die. Often a third of people who got it died. Those who didn’t die were often permanently not just with scars but made sterile or blinded in a eye or had damaged kidneys or lungs. The pox are internal too. Josiah Wedgewood, for example had his leg permanently damaged near the knee. In the end he had to have it amputated.

In 1901 to 1903, which was over 100 years of safe vaccinations for smallpox, there was a smallpox outbreak in Massachusetts. Those years 17% of those who got it in Boston died. In those same years in Cleveland there also was smallpox. Over 280 killed. Massachusetts made a law for mandatory vaccination. A pastor named Henning Jacobson refused to be vaccinated with the smallpox vaccine. He ran the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Church of Cambridge.

He said it was an invasion of his liberty, and that the law was "unreasonable, arbitrary and oppressive", and that one should “not be subjected to the law if he or she objects to vaccination, no matter the reason”. Almost the same words as today.

There was an Anti–Compulsory Vaccination League. The Board of Health considered Boston “practically a hot-bed of the anti-vaccine heresy.”

Opponents of smallpox vaccination in Boston questioned its safety and efficacy. They believed that compulsory vaccination was a violation of civil liberties and that “from the standpoint of free citizenship no government should forcibly inflict on any individual enjoying all other rights of the nation, a disease [vaccine] loathsome in its origin, and not free from danger to life, and with, at all events, impairment of bodily health, at least of a temporary nature.”

The Supreme Court in 1905 said his argument was wrong and mandatory vaccination was perfectly within the scope of the Constitution.

The Court held that:

“in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand" and that "[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”

Also, the Court held that mandatory vaccinations are neither arbitrary nor oppressive so long as they do not "go so far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public". In Massachusetts, with smallpox being "prevalent and increasing in Cambridge", the regulation in question was "necessary in order to protect the public health and secure the public safety".

That has been held up a number of times and still stands.

Here is a cartoon showing how smallpox vaccines would make people have cow characteristics.

This is indeed a very interesting question. The standard answer is that coronaviruses are RNA viruses which mutate orders of magnitude faster than DNA viruses like smallpox. However, this answer is a gross oversimplification at best. While it’s true that RNA viruses mutate very fast due to their error prone polymerases, it doesn’t mean these viruses change very fast in their spikes to evade the hosts’ antibodies. Actually only a few like influenza, HIV and hepatitis C make full use of their high mutation rates while most RNA viruses like measles

Second, antigenic variation is not the sole reason for vaccine breaching infections of COVID-19. Many respiratory viruses like RSV and parainfluenza are known to infect us repeatedly even though these viruses don’t change very often like influenza. Moreover, researchers have deliberately infected volunteers with the very same influenza or coronavirus they have encountered a year before

Instead of their mutation rates, their replication strategies may play a bigger role

Influenza and coronaviruses OTOH have way simpler lifecycle. When they enter our respiratory tract, they infect the respiratory epithelium immediately, and new viruses are also shedded to the airway directly while viremia is rarely seen. As a result, these viruses can multiply to infectious concentration in as few as one day, which gives little time for memory cells to activate. Although circulatory antibodies can neutralize the viruses before they gain a foothold, antibodies are very short lived and the IgA antibodies in the mucus decays even faster. In recent years tissue resident memory T cells (Trm) gained much attention because these cells combine the longevity of memory cells and fast acting nature of effector cells and some vaccines targeting Trm have showed promise (such as malaria vaccine). Unfortunately, unlike Trm in the skin, intestines and brain, Trm in the lungs are also very short lived for some yet unknown reasons

Understanding the subtle immunological differences between viruses is of great importance to guide our policies during a pandemic. When dealing with something like smallpox and measles (aggressive but easily preventable), it’s important to develop a highly effective vaccine to build an impenetrable herd immunity, so everyone (including those too old and too frail to receive vaccinations) will be protected. However, if the herd immunity seems impractical as is the case of COVID-19, vaccine development should put more emphasis on reducing the disease severity. Antiviral drugs like Paxlovid will also make an important complement to vaccination (especially for the most vulnerable people) to further attenuate the virulence of the viruses. In the meantime we should prepare more supportive drugs (such as self diagnose tools, antipyretics and anti inflammatory), ventilators and ICU beds for the potential surge of cases during reopening. In another word, we should not put all our hope on a miraculously effective vaccine. Instead a successful pandemic management requires a multi-layer defense and cooperation between multiple branches.

Footnotes

Smallpox is caused by a virus and is both seriously disfiguring and frequently deadly.

Cowpox is caused by a similar virus, but the symptoms are mild.

Back in the 1700s it was noticed that milk maids who had been infected with cowpox were immune to smallpox.

When a virus invades the body, it stimulates the formation of antibodies against the particular virus. It seems that the antibodies stimulated by the cow pox virus also worked against smallpox because the viruses are so similar in their molecular structure. The antibodies that the milk maids had developed toward cowpox prevented them from getting smallpox when the epidemic came to their town.

Early in the 19th century Edward Jenner took this observation and developed a vaccine for smallpox using cowpox antigen. This was the first use of the concept of vaccination. Today we vaccinate for all sorts of pathogens, both viral and bacterial. Since most pathogens do not have a harmless relative, an attenuated or killed form of the virus or bacterium is used to create antibodies. The latest example is the COVID vaccine.

The vaccine for smallpox was developed when a less deadly virus (cowpox) from the same family was put in humans. Couldn't the same be done with Covid19?

Back before the smallpox vaccine was developed there the process of inoculation, where a person could make the risky move of purposefully infecting themselves with smallpox from a person with a mild case in the hopes they would get a mild case and thus be immune. Think of it as a for-runner of a “chicken pox party” from the 1980s.

Of course this often lead to people becoming severely ill and dying, but it planted the seed of the idea that infecting someone with something mild could convey immunity from something more dangerous. And of course, there was the long-standing rumor that milk-maids didn’t get smallpox.

We of course now know that cowpox causes a very minor infection in people (typically) but is close enough to smallpox that once one has antibodies to cowpox the immunity is transferred.

And while that could work with a milder Corona Virus…we currently don't know of one that will only cause minor infections in people and provide immunity to Cov-Sars 2. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one out there, but we are yet to find it.

Due to an aggressive global vaccination program against smallpox, the disease has been completely eradicated. The only remaining smallpox virus in the world is in sealed samples in a lab, kept in case someday information from the virus is needed. It has ceased to exist as a human disease.

Polio was on its way to following it into oblivion, and had nearly been eradicated, when anti-vax movements stirred fears and people stopped vaccinating. Now it has made a comeback in some places and is on its way to becoming a worldwide threat again.

Measles was also on its way to being defeated. Now it is appearing in areas that had been entirely free of it.

The end goal of any vaccination program is to deny a disease access to any hosts, so that it cannot reproduce, and will die out. Then no one will need vaccinations against it ever again. However, unvaccinated individuals offer those diseases a refuge, and keep them in existence indefinitely, making eradication impossible.

Smallpox wasn't undergoing the same evolutionary pressure as SARS-CoV-2. Smallpox had long afflicted humans, whereas SARS-CoV-2 only recently jumped to humans, so there's high pressure for it to evolve better ways to infect humans.

Genetic technologies have advanced to an absurd degree since when the smallpox vaccine was introduced. It's now cheap and trivial to sequence viruses. PCR, used for testing, didn't even exist yet and strange PCR results have lead to discovering COVID variants. We just didn't have the same ability to monitor genetic changes as we do now. For all we know smallpox was evolving some degree of resistance as more and more people were vaccinated.

If you’ve been vaccinated against smallpox, research is suggesting that wou will be protected from monkeypox as well. In the US, though, if you’re under 50, you probably didn’t get a smallpox vaccination when you were a kid. From what research I’ve done, though, it’s not easy to catch monkeypox from another person; you have to have a lot of close contact. So, I’m not really sure that monkeypox is going to be a big concern.

(And a comment for those people who still don’t seem to understand how vaccines work — the reason smallpox vaccines were so effective is that we actually took them. People weren’t screaming about how the government was forcing them to put foreign substances in their bodies and nonsense like that. We got the shots, and now smallpox is gone. Funny how that works, isn’t it?)

Thanks to a vaccination campaign, the last naturally occurring case of smallpox was in 1977.

There are several theories about the origin of smallpox. All agree that it had its origin in a virus found in African rodents (e.g. gerbils), but they disagree on whether it emerged a few thousand years ago or 50000 years ago.

Since smallpox is extinct, it would take a similar evolutionary step to that early one for it to return. Far more likely is the emergence of some other zoonotic virus, as there are already a large pool of viruses which can infect humans, but haven’t quite taken the step of efficient human to human transmission. I’ll leave you with a quote from the CDC:

“On April 1, CDC confirmed one human HPAI A(H5N1) infection in a person with exposure to dairy cows in Texas that were presumed to be infected with the virus. This is thought to be the first instance of likely mammal to human spread of HPAI A(H5N1) virus. In May 2024, CDC began reporting additional, sporadic human cases in people who had exposure to infected dairy cows. That latest human case counts are available at H5N1 Bird Flu: Current Situation Summary.”

The latest counts as of 18 August, 2024, are 10 human cases from chickens, and 4 human cases from cows.

None of the vaccines are “lifelong”.

The measles and mumps combined vaccine is given typically 3 times - as a toddler, as a child, and an adult booster particularly if the adult is going to travel in an area where measles still circulates.

The polio vaccine is given 4 times to children, and adults who are traveling to areas where there is a polio risk will again get a booster shot.

The COVID vaccines are pretty typical, with initial series providing initial immunity and a booster after six months to (hopefully) provide longer term immunity. That’s the same schedule as the adult hepatitis B vaccine, for example.

The big difference for COVID is that while these other viral diseases have been suppressed by everyone being vaccinated, COVID is still spreading unchecked in the community because the vaccination rate isn’t high enough. That means that more mutations and variants are being generated, because mutations are directly proportional to the number of people infected. Some of those variants are more effective spreaders and have partially escaped “natural” immunity from previous infection.

Once vaccination for COVID is above 90%, the mutation rate will fall and a “final” modified booster will secure protection against the existing variants.

After that, the COVID vaccine will become just like the measles or polio vaccines. It will have a schedule, and kids and adults will just get it like normal human beings on the schedule, which will keep the virus suppressed.

“Can unvaccinated infections promote virus evolution to the point where vaccinated people become susceptible? Is this a valid threat?” Sort of. Not like “antibiotic resistance” however.

Influenza strains mutates through (usually) a couple of different animal species, before they rotate back around to humans again. But here, our immune response is only good for a year or so, before it forgets these viruses… in part why you have to get a flu shot every year.

But having an organism that thrives unchecked in a population for long periods of time, produces / enable mutation. For example the current COVID-19 started out as two strains, and one of those strains has developed a close mutation (human immune response will stop all three so far). In a study in India, with hundreds of samples, every instance of this particular virus was slightly different with almost every person.

With antibiotic resistance, there are surviving organisms in the treated human. In the unvaccinated, you don’t have the “mutation selection” that would favor mutant strains that avoided the human immune system.

Sorry, the premise of the question is wildly incorrect:

• Most flu vaccines are rather middling in their performance. Efficacy rates of 50–60% are the norm.
• Flu vaccines nowadays comprise a mixture that includes the 4 strains deemed to be most likely to be in high circulation in the following flu season based on surveillance trends; these are only educated guesses and they are not always correct. This is why in some flu seasons, the vaccine efficacy is especially low. And this is something that the CDC (among other health organizations around the world), is always keeping track of (see below):

• The flu vaccine against a specific strain can only protect against, at most, a handful of highly related strains and offers limited protection against the more than one hundred major strains of the virus that are known to circulate. This is why if the prediction alluded to in #2 is incorrect, the vaccine mixture is not particularly effective. There are many years in which the vaccine mixture is a poor match against the dominant strains in circulation - as a matter of fact, both this year’s vaccine and last year’s were a poor match - thankfully, with COVID and people being a bit more careful in terms of reducing their exposures to respiratory viruses, the flu season was abnormally low.
• In addition to incorrect predictions on circulating strains, there are additional factors that affect the efficacy of the flu vaccine. Read this:

Finally, plenty of people die from the flu each year, including many people who have been vaccinated. But we don’t hear much about this because we’ve gotten used to it. Flu seasons come and go, and every year, some 30–60 thousand Americans will die from the flu. It’s just become part of life; like people dying from guns, in car accidents, or from clogged arteries.

In truth, the flu vaccines aren’t all that great and we only wish that they were as good as the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are, particularly the mRNA vaccines. Personally, I get the flu vaccine each year, even when it’s been deemed to be less protective.

The vaccines are the only preventative measure we have and the only proactive thing you can do other than staying at home in a bubble during the entire flu season or wearing personal protection — something that would have been unthinkable in many parts of the world until COVID. And quite frankly, now that there will hopefully be less stigma around wearing facemasks in my neck of the woods, I will probably keep wearing a good respirator-type mask when I’m in a confined space with many people, one of whom may be infected and infectious and it’s flu season. For example, if I’m on an airplane; air purification on airplanes may be amazing, but it can’t protect you if the person who sits next to you happens to be sick and coughing all over you (this has happened to me on more than one occasion, including a 13-hour flight to New Zealand).

This question, Marion Anderson, contains two disparate concepts.

Q. Is monkeypox the same as smallpox? If we got a smallpox vaccine years ago, are we immune?

A. No, definitely not, monkeypox isn't the same as smallpox. It belongs to the same genus, Orthopoxvirus, which contains smallpox, monkeypox, cowpox, horsepox, and camelpox, among others.

Through a massive vaccination campaign, the world officially eliminated smallpox in 1980. That achievement saved millions of lives each year.

But the end of smallpox had a repercussion: It opened the door for monkeypox to emerge, possibly worldwide.

However, cross immunity is often conferred by one successfully surviving another viral infection in the same genus (ie, cowpox → smallpox). Those who received smallpox vaccinations before 1972 are expected to exhibit some degree

We have a vaccine, Jynneos (2019), developed to provide immunity to monkeypox and administered via ring vaccination.

Footnotes

This is a great question!

The main reason a mild corona virus cannot create antibodies against COVID-19 is that the mild corona virus—the common cold—doesn’t create many antibodies, period.

How many times do people get infected/reinfected by the common cold?

And you want those antibodies to protect you against something? Fat chance.

COVID-19 behaves like a corona virus—or the common cold—by attaching pieces of its crown to different areas and organs in the body. It attaches to the upper respiratory system, the lungs, even the heart. This is a lot of area for antibodies to cover, and the weak and temporary antibodies provided by the lesser corona viruses are just not up to the job.

Sorry.

The above chart shows the time required to develop vaccines for various diseases. Look at polio and then look at covid.

Vaccine development is not an easy task. It takes a very long time. It requires detailed knowledge about the organism against which the vaccine is to be made.

Also it depends on the strains of the organisms.

Smallpox had only 1 strain. So the vaccine against that strain was highly effective and we eradicated the disease completely.

Polio has 3 strains. We have eradicated type 2 and type 3 strains of polio. Only type 1 remains currently. Since the polio virus is not actively mutating. It's possible to eradicate this strain in the near future.

Covid is a multi strain disease. Plus not much is known about all the strains either. So even though we have a vaccine. Covid will persist in this world unless and until the virus self inactivated.

(Why) can't a mild coronavirus create antibodies against COVID-19? You presume the knowledge that there is a mild coronavirus known. At the moment no such mild-Covid-19 is known. The people with a mild case of Covid-19 seem to have the same virus as those who die rapidly. It took Edward Jenner to take the old-wives-tale that milk-maids rarely got smallpox because they had been exposed to the milder disease cowpox because of their career working with cows. That was a long held rumor before he invented the early form of ‘vaccination’ with cowpox that was the earliest the term vaccination was used. Earlier it was widespread practice to actually inject someone who you wanted to save from ‘catching’ smallpox subcutaneously with the exudate of pox sores but do it in an extremity. Such artificial infections with smallpox rarely (1–2% of cases) actually killed the injected person who survived to be immune from future natural infections with smallpox.

No such non-serious COVID-19 infections or mild-coronavirus infections have been suggested to confer immunity to COVID-19 natural infects. The COVID-19 virus is too new to have developed any such rumors. It was centuries of smallpox history before the wives-tales of strange immunities among the milk maids surfaced and was tested by Jenner

Do they really?
Prove it.
Tell me, how does a vaccine that causes serum antibodies prevent a virus entering a skin cell? Or a lung cell? What exact mechanism do you think is going on there?
Well I’ll tell you, vaccines, none of them prevent infection. They can’t, there is no mechanism at all that could prevent infection. Everybody catches viruses at the same probability rate. The more virus you come across the more likely you catch that virus.
Vaccines come into play after you contract a virus, they kill virus and infected cells that are in contact with your blood and interstitial fluids. They prevent internal viral colonisation. And that’s all they can do.

Because the monkeypox virus is closely related to the virus that causes smallpox, the smallpox vaccine can protect humans from getting monkeypox. Previous information from Africa suggests that the smallpox vaccine is at least 85% effective at preventing monkeypox. The effectiveness of JYNNEOS TM against monkeypox is concluded from a medical finding regarding the immunogenicity of JYNNEOS and efficacy data from animal studies.

The smallpox and monkeypox vaccines are wonderful at protecting humans from monkeypox before they are exposed to smallpox. Experts also believe that vaccination after monkeypox has spread can help prevent the disease or make it less severe.

Vaccination is viable even after the monkeypox virus has propagated. However, the faster an exposed man or woman receives the vaccine, the better.

The CDC recommends that the vaccine be given within four days from the date of promotion to prevent the onset of disease. If given between 4-14 days after the date of exposure, vaccination can reduce the signs and symptoms of the disease, though not prevent the disease.

There are currently no specific treatments available for monkeypox infection, although monkeypox outbreaks can be controlled.

The smallpox vaccine, cidofovir, ST-246, and vaccinia immune globulin (VIG), can be used to manage an outbreak of monkeypox. CDC education was developed for the use of first-rate accessible facts about the benefits and dangers of smallpox vaccination and drug use for the prevention and administration of monkeypox and various orthopoxvirus infections.

The smallpox vaccine may additionally protect people from the monkeypox virus because the two viruses are closely related.

Statistics from Africa quoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) show that the smallpox vaccine has been 85% good against the monkeypox virus.

You can get the smallpox vaccine after being exposed to monkeypox, even though the CDC recommends that the sooner you get vaccinated after exposure, the better.

The best time to get the vaccine is within 4 days from the date of exposure.

The CDC also recommends that if you have been exposed to monkeypox and have not received the smallpox vaccine in the past three years, you should get vaccinated.

Because the vaccine eliminated smallpox, we dont have any actual way of knowing. I have not found any studies done in Africa on the rate of monkeypox in persons who were vaccinated against smallpox earlier in their life. Scientists have evaluate blood titers of immunized persons, and that indicates immunity my have wained.

I asked this question when I was in biological weapons training at Ft Detrick MD back in the early 2000′s. Ft Detrick is the Armys research facility for biological and chemical weapons.

Their opinion was that those vaccinated may not have enough immunity to fight off smallpox.

This opinion was one of the reasons that the US stockpiled smallpox vaccine.

If I was exposed, or at rist of being exposed, I would opt for the new Jynneos, vaccine approved for smallpox and monkeypox.

in most cases, the smallpox vaccination will protect against monkey pox, especially if the vaccine was given in the previous three years. Very few people have gotten it in the last three years. Smallpox was completely eliminated in the wild nearly fifty years ago, so it has no longer been needed. It was also a dangerous, reactive vaccine. I got it as a baby, but that was decades ago. They could easily make a specific monkey pox vaccine, and I’m sure they will, or they could use the smallpox vaccine stockpiled, or make more of that.

At this time, monkey pox is very rare, even in central and west Africa. At this time, there have been several dozen cases diagnosed or suspected, in several European countries, Canada, and the US. Most seem to have been contracted by travelers in Nigeria, so far apparently from the less serious west African strain.

I wouldn’t worry about it at this time. Everyone in the world has more pressing serious issues to worry about right now. That might change, but at this time I think everyone may rest assured that either the old smallpox or a new monkey pox vaccine will soon be readily available everywhere.

Too early to make blanket statements.

There are two vaccines of interest. A newer monkeypox vaccine in short supply and the old smallpox vaccine stockpiled in quantity.

Monkeypox is not new. There is information going back to 1958.
Smallpox vaccinations essentially stopped about 1970 so speculation
is that we now have a growing population without any protection.

The old smallpox vaccine by one old report was +85% effective. I have not inspected the data for the new monkeypox vaccine which is interesting and new technology.

Too early to speculate.
There is a smallpox bioterrorism plan that is quite extensive. I scanned it and feel that it could stop this virus if necessary. The R value of monkeypox is low enough that the old vaccine could control it per my back of envelope scribbled notes.

I am not worried.
If invited to vaccinate I will show up.

No vaccine prevents against infection 100% All vaccines lower the odds of catching the disease, and lessen symptoms if you do catch it. They do this by stimulating your own immune system to fight the infection faster and better. But if your immune system is too weak, you will still get sick. One you have been sick, your immune system is “tuned” to fight the disease and you won’t get it again.

But covid is unique in being able to ignore immunity from previous bouts of the disease. Whether you recovered from Covid previously or got the vaccine, you can catch the disease again. The covid vaccine works like all the others, but covid has evolved to get around that protection. IT is also constantly spawning new variants that previous vaccines don’t address, just like the flu does.

While both the smallpox vaccine and the COVID-19 vaccine are very important tools in preventing the spread of infectious diseases, they differ in terms of the viruses they target, the technologies used in their development and the nature of the diseases they address.

• Smallpox, caused by the variola virus, was a highly contagious and deadly disease that plagued humanity for centuries. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared smallpox eradicated in 1980.
• COVID-19 is caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 appearing late 2019.
• The smallpox vaccine employs a technique known as live attenuated vaccination. It utilises a weakened form of the actual smallpox virus, called vaccinia virus, to stimulate an immune response in the body. The variola virus is remarkably stable (no mutations).
• The COVID-19 vaccine utilises various platforms, including mRNA-based vaccines (such as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines) and viral vector-based vaccines (such as the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines). Unlike the smallpox vaccine, these vaccines do not contain the live virus responsible for COVID-19. Instead, they contain just enough genetic instructions to teach our cells to produce a harmless piece of the coronavirus spike protein which prompts the immune system to recognise and mount a defence against the spike protein, offering protection against COVID-19 by reducing the potential damage coming from an infection. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus mutates fast and continuously.
• The smallpox vaccine was developed over a long time by “a single man” called Edward Jenner, an English physician and scientist and “his own” experimentation and testing. A successful vaccine was eventually introduced in the late 19th century and underwent (necessary) refinements over the following decades. Of course, Jenner's work was met with scepticism and resistance initially, as is often the case with groundbreaking scientific discoveries, although in those days, of course, there were no Tik-Tok influencers who know sh*t about anything spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories all over the world.
• The COVID-19 vaccine development was an unprecedented global (worldwide) effort. Given the urgent need to address the pandemic, scientists, researchers and pharmaceutical companies worldwide collaborated intensely to accelerate the vaccine development process. This resulted in rapid modern (online connected) development, parallel testing in numerous sites and official approval of multiple and varied COVID-19 vaccines.
• In terms of global impact, the smallpox vaccine played a pivotal role in eradicating smallpox and eliminating the disease from the planet.
• The COVID-19 vaccine, while still in the process of being distributed worldwide, aims to control the spread of COVID-19, reduce severe illness and ultimately bring an end to the pandemic by progressively reducing the spread (and proliferation) of the virus worldwide.

Easy peasy answer, CV.

Q. How many years will it take to find out how the monkeypox vaccine interacts with the covid vaccine?

A. Zero. Vaccines do not remain in your system after 1–2 days. Vaccines generate an immune response and memory cells.

When children are given a mixed bag of vaccines, they don't interact with one another.

Perhaps you're attempting to resurrect the Covid-19 mix-and-match argument. It's been resolved very satisfactorily; no issues.

Also, we're not going to vaccinate entire populations with the monkeypox vaccine. We practice ring vaccination on individuals affected after trace contacts.

The smallpox vaccinated community is highly resistant to monkeypox.

Footnotes

You know that’s not a thing, right?

Vaccines are not like drugs. They don’t hang around in your system and interact with other drugs in potentially harmful ways.

They are introduced into your system, provoke an immune response and then are gone, nothing remaining in your body. It’s not “the vaccine” that is protecting you from COVID. It’s the antibodies your immune system has developed as a result of the immune response prompted by the vaccine that are protecting you.

As far as the available COVID vaccines go, any trace of them is completely gone from your body within a day or two. After that, gone.

They can’t interact with anything because there’s nothing left to interact with.

There is very little data for vaccination 50 years ago.

The 50 year old vaccine had a 3–5 year refresh cycle. Then breakthrough with smallpox was known. Monkeypox breakthrough would also have about the same or more breakthrough given the acceleration of contagion in MSM interactions.

The data from Africa generated an 85% effectivity number in vaccinated individuals. Vaccinations for smallpox in endemic monkeypox regions did not stop the way smallpox vaccinations did in the US. Thus I dismiss the current vaccination number at ~85% as NOT applicable to those vaccinated +50 years ago. New data may change my mind.

There might be some protection but I do not see anything but a smooth curve where I would expect to see a +50 years look back discontinuity. The back of my envelope also has the indicated old group as a too small a group to answer this question with.

If at risk, get vaccinated. If not at risk do not put yourself at risk by caring for someone that is infected while not understanding PPE guidelines and contagion risks.

Simple cautions and vaccination can put the effective community R number well below one.
Responsible actions can make this a historic event. Yes more should vaccinate globally.

Immunity means war against the invaders. When something invades to destabilize our system, all the energies are directed towards elimination of the invaders. Fight against the invaders involve multipronged approach. It involves chemical warfare (antibodies), physically attacking the germs by directly swallowing them by our fighter cells to digest them (phagocytic action), etc.

For producing antibodies, our cells require various nutrients like proteins, glucose, vitamins, anti-oxidants, etc. Since the body's priority is to eliminate the invaders, the fighter cells utilize most of the nutrients to make antibodies.

While engaging physical combat (phagocytosis), very often the fighter cells may die in large numbers and the body needs to produce more fighter cells to replace the dead ones.

Thus, all the above activities consume most of the nutrients and other cells may not get enough nutrients. It means, other basic processes slow down due to which, we feel fatigued.

Now coming to your question of why immunity lasts only for a defined period. To understand this, first let us understand the following analogy.

Even in our war times, we follow the same method. All the resources like food items, ammunition, etc are diverted to the soldiers fighting the war because that is the priority at that point of time. Ordinary citizens will have to make do their lives with minimum consumption for survival and country’s economic condition becomes fatigued. Once the war is over, the resources will be released for all to bring normalcy. Suppose, even after the war is over, the resources continue to be diverted for war activities, what happens will be that the ordinary civilians will be starving and dying for want of basic resources and the whole country crumbles.

I am sure, you may be getting the logic behind the immunity remaining only for a defined time. For the same reason in the above analogy, our body stops diverting its resources for producing antibodies and other immunity functions after a certain time so as to make available the resources for all the cells to bring normalcy. That will be our recovery period after overcoming the infection.

So, I don't think it will be appropriate for a vaccine to artificially induce our body to continue producing antibodies forever. I am sure, it might lead to some other problem and we may remain fatigued forever.