Smallpox vaccine Smallpox vaccine Smallpox vaccine, the first successful vaccine to be developed, was introduced by Edward Jenner in 1796. He followed up his observation that milkmaids who had previously caught cowpox did not later catch smallpox by showing that inoculated cowpox protected against inoculated smallpox. Dryvax is a freeze-dried calf lymph smallpox vaccine. It is the world's oldest smallpox vaccine, created in the late 19th century by American Home Products, a predecessor of Wyeth. By the 1940s, Wyeth was the leading US manufacturer of the vaccine and the only manufacturer by the 1960s. After world health authorities declared smallpox had been
Smallpox vaccine "vaccine"/"vaccination" referred only to smallpox, but in 1881 Louis Pasteur proposed that to honour Jenner the terms be widened to cover the new protective inoculations being introduced. In late 2001, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom considered stockpiling smallpox vaccines, even while assuring the public that there was no "specific or credible" threat of bioterrorism. Later, the director of State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR warned that terrorists could easily lure underpaid former Soviet researchers to turn over samples to be used as a weapon, saying "All you need is a sick fanatic to