How would this government deal with an outbreak of smallpox?

[longwayoff]

The smallpox virus now exists only in a laboratory. There is no herd immunity to it. It's very dangerous and would have, my estimate, a 70% fatality rate. It's highly infectious. There is an effective vaccination against it so this won't arise but AIBU to think that, in the absence of a vaccine, it wouldn't be
appropriate for the government to say 'don't worry we'll just let it level out and see what happens'.

Hopefulfor2020

I was a bit surprised how long ago it was . It made a real impact on me. It was very well done.

@TheMemoryLingers of course - kids get their first mmr jab at 12 months old. checking that all women and girls over the age of puberty have immunity (not 100% guaranteed from childhood jabs) is the best way to protect babies under the age of 12 months as well as unborn babies.

VadenuRewetje Ah, so girls get two jobs now - gotcha. I didn't realise they still had the puberty age one as well as infant MMR.

I was vaccinated against smallpox - still have the scar on my arm above my BCG scar

^ jabs, obviously, not jobs.

There's a vaccine for smallpox so it would just be a matter of putting it into production as quickly as possible. Given even a 'mild' dose of smallpox is still pretty serious then quarantine would be extremely strict until vaccination can be rolled out.
Have a read up about how the last outbreaks of smallpox were contained, it's very clever.
As for C19? I find myself more cynical than is probably wise. But bird flu and swine flu were not that bad and I actually had swine flu. I don't know. I'm still following hand washing advice though.

TheMemoryLingers

All children, unless their parents choose otherwise, get MMR at 13 months and again at 3 years 4 months. We then check rubella immunity as part of antenatal care.

We dropped the rubella vaccination for adolescence, because quite simply, the old system of only immunising pre-teen girls wasn't as effective as hoped. Rubella circulated freely amongst children, and as no vaccine is 100% effective, and immunity can wear off, women with lapsed immunity caught it during pregnancy from their nursery-aged child.

So we opted to immunise all children at a younger age in the hope of also eliminating it as a routine childhood disease, and it has worked so much better.

We’d be absolutely fucked if there was a serious smallpox epidemic. There’s nowhere near enough vaccine to contain a large outbreak. It’d make this look like a sunny afternoon at the park.