It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
...The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. It led to the arrest of a participating physician, Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining public health.[2][3] The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan[4][5][6][7] and a rise in violence against healthcare workers for being perceived as spies.[8] The rise in vaccine hesitancy following the program led to the re-emergence of polio in Pakistan, with Pakistan having by far the largest number of polio cases in the world by 2014.[8]
We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
> The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_va...
Wikipedia somehow makes it eve worse than that:
"The campaign ended early in June 2003, with only 38,257 civilian health care workers vaccinated, after several hospitals refused to participate due to the risk of the live virus infecting vulnerable patients and skepticism about the risks of an attack, and after over 50 heart complications were reported by the CDC."
(https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-harvey-... for those unfamiliar with the quote)
Unfortunately this is not the case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63707-z
"Measles virus evolved from the then-widespread rinderpest virus most probably between the 11th and 12th centuries."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
There's a gulf between assembling a vaccine - which is a commonplace technology, and assembling a viable infectious viral particle.
Being able to order all the oligos of a viral sequence isn't even step 1.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1
As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.
https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning...
I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.
The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.
(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)
The bad actors are predictable. And I suspect at least two others are lying.