[Tor3]

The part of the article which explains how the smallpox vaccine was distributed around the world before cold storage and airplanes is just incredible.

  1) Recruit 22 orphaned boys 
  2) Inject two of them with the cowpox virus (which is the actual smallpox vaccine)
  3) Put all the boys on a ship leaving Spain for Venezuela 
  4) Scrape material from the two boy's pustules (appearing after a couple of days) and inject two more boys with that - the first two boys recover 
  5) Continue this daisy-chain approach until reaching Venezuela 
  6) Go on with people in Venezuela, arm-to-arm 
  7) Continue to Mexico and other places 
  8) Go global

And that's how you transport vaccines without fridges and airplanes

[psychphysic]

What's even funnier is that it's horsepox[0].

At some point it got swapped, maybe a milk maid actually got it off a horse and assumptions were made.

No current smallpox vaccine stock is molecularly likely to come from cowpox as I understand it.

[0] https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...

[Tor3]

Yes, I came across that recently. It may even have been mentioned on HN before - that the original smallpox vaccine is apparently lost.