One of the lesser-known reasons for the eradication of smallpox was the desire of the doctors to eradicate vaccinia virus along with smallpox. Vaccinia gave a fairly high rate of complications, and it could make some people very sick or kill them. About one in a million people who got the vaccine during the Eradication died of it, and a larger number of people got very sick from it. The eradicators wanted to eliminate the need for vaccination, and the way to do that was to get rid of the disease. A study done by the WHO suggested that the world was losing one and a half billion dollars a year
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This could be how we made the leap into the Information Era
