How do you think we eradicated Smallpox?
Yes we did:
> In 1901 a deadly smallpox epidemic tore through the Northeast, prompting the Boston and Cambridge boards of health to order the vaccination of all residents. But some refused to get the shot, claiming the vaccine order violated their personal liberties under the Constitution.
> One of those holdouts, a Swedish-born pastor named Henning Jacobson, took his anti-vaccine crusade all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation's top justices issued a landmark 1905 ruling that legitimized the authority of states to “reasonably” infringe upon personal freedoms during a public health crisis by issuing a fine to those who refused vaccination.
The point is even with smallpox some people refused to get the vaccine. People are weird.
...of five dollars back then, which would be ~$160 today.
The difference between a $160 fine and being fired from your job is enormous, but you just ignored that part to make your argument.
By quarantine and contact tracing, after vaccination failed.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/end-smallpox
> Contrary to popular belief smallpox was not eradicated by mass vaccination. Though tried initially it proved difficult to implement in many countries and was abandoned in favour of surveillance-containment. This involved trained workers searching for cases, with rewards for those who found them. Cases and their contacts were then isolated; contacts were vaccinated. Interestingly this strategy incorporated elements of a system devised in 1778 by John Haygarth in Chester. The last natural case occurred in Somalia in 1977 and after exhaustive enquiries the 1980 WHO Assembly concluded that smallpox had been eradicated.
1902 letter about the Leicester, UK method that was later adopted elsewhere, https://ia601300.us.archive.org/28/items/b24765430/b24765430...
> I am far from saying that vaccination is a delusion, but the experience of Leicester during the past thirty years has been unique, and shows that compulsory vaccination is not essential for the effectual control of smallpox, for despite the neglect of vaccination, the authorities here have been successful in stamping out numerous outbreaks of smallpox, the deaths from the disease have been very few, and the expense involved, when compared with that in other well-vaccinated towns, has been trifling. Under these circumstances I have ventured to publish the following paper, read at the Congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health, held at Exeter, in August, which explains in detail what is known as the “Leicester system of dealing with smallpox.”
