Today is the “birthday” of vaccination. Well, the anniversary of Jenner’s early use of cow pox to immunize the child of a trusty local yokel against smallpox. Seems to have worked🤔.
PS…the daughter’s 44th birthday (she hasn’t caught smallpox…yet!)
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Smallpox was officially declared eradicated on May 8, 1980 by the World Health Assembly.
By the time your daughter was born in 1981 there was no smallpox left anywhere in the world (except in carefully-guarded government vials). Smallpox vaccination was terminated because there was more risk in handling the vaccine and no risk of exposure to the virus in the public.
I was vaccinated in elementary school (about 1963?). My arm didn’t get a mark so they repeated the vaccination. Again, no mark. They told me I am naturally immune to smallpox. I’m sure that repeated smallpox epidemics in Europe/ Asia tended to favor smallpox immunity mutants in the population. The reason the Europeans were able to colonize the Americas while smallpox (and measles, etc.) wiped out the native populations.
Wendy
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One thing I could not help but notice, when watching a movie set in ancient Rome or Greece, among others, where women wore sleeveless garments, was the smallpox scar on the arms of the actresses. Not covering that scar with makeup was as bad as seeing actors with late 60s style sideburns depicting an era where sideburns were not a thing.
A real, WWII, GI haircut.
Steve…also scarless
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I was born in 1952 and was probably among the first babies in the UK at the time to not receive the smallpox vaccination as routine. Then we had a very highly publicized “outbreak” and I recall the notices to parents going home from school and lining up at the local clinic to get our stabbing…
I remember the aftermath of that smallpox shot. Boy, was my arm sore. I recall our teacher at the time…Mr Ainscough…warning the class repeatedly before recess that, for those of us who’d received out shot, our arms would be very sore, and for those who had not yet to be very careful indeed around us. They were that, alright…careful to bump or grab our arms at every opportunity.
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I don’t think that is correct.
Voyager 1’s velocity is ~38,000 mph = 333,108,000 miles/year = .0000567 light years per year, So , 56 light years in 1x10^6 years. The pic has it almost 7,000 light years. Probably still in the same red dot at the start.
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