Otherwise our track record isn't stellar. The efforts with other diseases that could be eradicated have struggled. Polio is closest with just a few remaining countries. Future eradication attempts may be much harder due to the rise of anti-vaxxers.
Actually Guinea worm disease is closest to eradication: closer than polio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis
The standard vaccination schedule is comprised of vaccinations with benefits which outweigh the medical risk and cost. If you travel to less developed areas you may receive a wider array of vaccinations.
For an eradicated disease there is no benefit and therefore no reason to assume the risk, or cost.
-- http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/committee/topics/smallpox/...
Weaponized smallpox almost certainly exists. It escaped a Soviet lab in the 70s and other countries including the US worked on it.
Smallpox is uniquely deadly... it wiped out something like 75% of the indigenous population of the americas.
Yep, when they shipped us off to the Middle East in '03 they gave us the smallpox vaccination even if you had it as a kid because, well, WMDs.
Don't think I had it as a kid since I was born in '71 and that's around the time they were phasing it out -- or at least didn't have the vaccination scar before '03.
The indigenous people were exposed to many diseases, not just smallpox:
>...Numerous diseases were brought to North America, including bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, the common cold, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, sexually transmitted diseases, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis, and pertussis (whooping cough).[2][3][4] Each of these brought destruction through sweeping epidemics, involving disability, illness, and extensive deaths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
>...it wiped out something like 75% of the indigenous population of the americas.
It's hard to give a precise estimate of how many deaths occurred. Some say it was much higher than 75%. For example:
>...Between 1492 and 1650 the Native American population may have declined by as much as 90% as the result of virgin-soil epidemics (outbreaks among populations that have not previously encountered the disease), compound epidemics, crop failures and food shortages.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-...
1) In some (fairly small) fraction of recipients it lead to severe side-effects, including death.
2) It was a live-virus vaccine, which meant a vaccine recipient could actually infect those around them (with the vaccine, effectively). This was a serious problem if anyone near the recipient was immune-compromised; the risk of deleterious side-effects in immune-compromised individuals, who would not be vaccinated normally) was much higher.
There is a modern (a few years old!) smallpox vaccine that is a dead-virus vaccine and would have a very different cost-benefit tradeoff in medical terms. I don't know what the economic tradeoff looks like (i.e. how expensive it is).
> Based on past experience, it is estimated that 1 or 2 people in 1 million (0.000198 percent) who receive the vaccine may die as a result, most often the result of postvaccinial encephalitis or severe necrosis in the area of vaccination (called progressive vaccinia). Given these risks, as smallpox became effectively eradicated and the number of naturally occurring cases fell below the number of vaccine-induced illnesses and deaths, routine childhood vaccination was discontinued in the United States in 1972, and was abandoned in most European countries in the early 1970s.