eli5: How was smallpox eradicated but other diseases are significantly harder to completely get rid of?
In: Biology
Another factor: Smallpox is a DNA virus. It has, compared to things like the flu or COVID which are RNA viruses, a quite stable genome. It doesn’t mutate very fast at all, and modern studies in the small bits of smallpox virus that still exist show it wasn’t particularly diverse, so it didn’t really have any tricks up its sleeve to escape from the vaccine when we came for it unlike influenza viruses, which mutate so fast that we need yearly vaccines.
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