Looks like not too many people want to mess with the smallpox virus:
Less than a year after President Bush announced a smallpox vaccination plan to protect Americans in the event of a terrorist attack, a fraction of the expected number of health workers have been immunized and the much ballyhooed program is dead in the water.
Federal health officials say they’re not ready to declare the program dead, but they readily acknowledge it’s ailing.
“The fact is, it’s ceased,” says Ray Strikas of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “not that anyone’s issued an edict to say stop.”
The smallpox vaccination program was a central part of the Bush administration’s plan to protect the nation against bioterrorist threats in the wake of 9/11.
Predictably, administrators are trying to put a rosy spin on the program’s limited acceptance:
Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says the plan has accomplished what it set out to do. “We are pleased that the program has inoculated enough first responders and health care workers that could respond should there be an outbreak of smallpox,” he says.
But the number of people vaccinated is far less than health officials planned for:
States initially told the CDC that they expected to administer 450,000 doses to health workers who would form response teams ready to care for patients infected with the deadly virus. Though the CDC has shipped 291,400 doses, at last count, 38,549 people had been vaccinated.
The risks of the smallpox vaccine have been fairly-widely known. But I suspect the response rate would have been much higher had we had another domestic terrorist attack since 9/11.
In the grand scheme of things, 38,000 doesn’t seem like a whole lot of health care workers. Hopefully we won’t have an outbreak which makes it an issue.