Don't take this as a serious analysis, but I can't help but attribute so much anti-covid vaccine mentality to the fact that Covid is NOT a visible disease, and quite frankly, it's lethality is a dice-roll. Perfectly healthy twenty-somethings can be laid-low while retirees can show no symptoms. The disease has to be taken seriously but its variability skews people's perception of it.
Smallpox, on the other hand, is absolutely grotesque in comparison. Highly visible and much more lethal. In terms of human perception I think that fear of catching it would overrule the fear of 'the government' or 'the pharmaceutical companies'. It also probably helps that the Smallpox vaccine has been around for a lot longer.
There is a certain truth to this. I'm listening to the wonderful History of Byzantium podcast, and an episode is devoted to the plague during Justinian's reign that killed maybe 40% of the population of Constantinople. Whole ships of dead sailors drifted the seas. The description of the disease progression caused by Yersinia pestis is awful. People were throwing themselves off buildings to end their suffering. So higher mortality, and more visible, less ambiguous symptoms (like necrosis, giant lymph nodes, etc.).
Not to discount the seriousness of covid at all. I have a relative in his 40s whose life hangs on a thread right now.
There's no need to fear the .gov or big pharma when it comes to smallpox because there's no need to trust them in the first place. The smallpox vaccine is old and very well proven.
I'm having trouble getting good stats on it, but it looks like there were a handful of deaths -- maybe, single or low double digits -- that could be directly attributed to the COVID vaccine.
The smallpox vaccine, if we had to vaccinate the whole country, could cause some deaths too. This pretty old paper estimates somewhere ~200, I've seen an estimate elsewhere of around ~500, can't get a good source on the second one (probably they are in the same ballpark accounting for error bars and population growth since the '60s).
Anyway, all this is to say -- there are definitely complaints to be had about big pharma, but the industry is pretty good at managing measurable risks nowadays. I don't know if 'old and well proven' is quite right. They were working with a different set of tradeoffs -- they had worse tech at the time, expectations were lower (and medicine was generally more dangerous)... but obviously, better than getting smallpox!
I'm not sure, actually. I wasn't able to find any information on the safety of a single dose of saline solution. There is apparently a health risk from being on saline solution for a long time (I guess it hurts your kidneys and some other stuff). Stories about this swamped stories about the fundamental safety of a small amount.
These vaccines do of course have some (rare! and way less bad than getting sick!) side effects. So I'd suspect a saline shot to be less dangerous. But that's a guess.
Smallpox, on the other hand, is absolutely grotesque in comparison. Highly visible and much more lethal. In terms of human perception I think that fear of catching it would overrule the fear of 'the government' or 'the pharmaceutical companies'. It also probably helps that the Smallpox vaccine has been around for a lot longer.