I often feel like I am representing the pro-vaccination side of the debate. I have contemporaries who live with paralysis and deafness from Polio, I’ve seen what Rubella can do and I see the headlines when some adolescent kid dies of Meningitis. I did a lot of Nineteenth Century literature, and infectious disease was the usual guise of the Reaper in those days. It’s from this perspective that I can say that I never considered opting for the Smallpox vaccine when the government was pushing it for health care workers. I was concerned for my own personal risk, it never occured to me that the vaccine could be a hazard to small children close to the vaccinated person, but it makes sense. The vaccine causes a large runny sore. Those of us who are old enough to have recieved it when Smallpox vaccination was routine have a little round scar on the upper arm. Recently, one soldier’s little boy was exposed to his father’s vaccination.

WASHINGTON – The 2-year-old son of a soldier deployed to Iraq is in critical condition after developing a reaction to his father’s smallpox vaccination, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Saturday. The child, being treated in a Chicago hospital, has a rare but very serious reaction to the vaccination site called Eczema vaccinatum, the CDC said. It is the first such case since vaccination against smallpox resumed in 2002, said CDC pox virus expert Dr. Inger Damon.

It’s all risk versus benefit. If a natural case of Smallpox occurred anywhere on this continent, I’d be lining up to beg for the vaccine. I’d face the agonizing choice of whether my child and little nieces and nephews should get it.

We’re not facing that choice. When the Smallpox vaccine was offered to health care workers there were very few who opted to get it, even though the fear of terrorism, including bioterrorism like Anthrax, was at a peak. For one thing, we were used to religiously throwing out any vial of vaccine that had passed its expiration date. The Smallpox vaccine had been sitting around in freezers for decades. More important– there were no cases of Smallpox anywhere on earth. In the risk versus benefit equation this was an unknown risk for a theoretical benefit — thanks, but no thanks.

I hadn’t been aware that our troops were getting mandatory Smallpox vaccination. Soldiers have complained in the past about being nailed with multiple vaccinations without their consent. This is a tragic reminder that nothing is risk-free and the injuries of this war to our soldiers and their families will last beyond our generation.