Do you realize that the "vaccine" for smallpox is actually cowpox?
Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a beautiful milkmaid. Her face was flawless, her complexion peaches and cream, her smile confident as she bragged, "I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face."
A 13-year-old orphan boy heard the milkmaid's boastful declaration of immunity — or so the story goes. The boy was Edward Jenner, an apprentice to a country surgeon. Jenner's name would one day be famous for developing the world's first vaccine, which would eventually rid the earth of the scourge of smallpox.
Jenner grew up to become a doctor in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, in England. In 1796, he vaccinated a child named James Phipps with pus taken from a cowpox pustule, according to a historical report in 2005 in the journal Baylor University Medical Proceedings. He was testing a theory, supposedly brewing in his mind since the milkmaid's comment, that exposure to the relatively mild disease of cowpox would protect people from the far deadlier disease of smallpox. And it worked. The Phipps boy proved immune when exposed to smallpox after vaccination with cowpox, as did several other children Jenner experimented on, including his 11-month-old son. LINK