The Smallpox Scare

In Manhattan and its surrounding counties, by last week, there were eleven cases of smallpox (including one death) traceable to a visiting Mexican (TIME, April 21). Health officials hoped that the situation was under control. But up & down the eastern seaboard, plain citizens were taking no chances:

P: In Manhattan, people queued up by the thousands, sometimes in lines five blocks long, for vaccination. By week's end, despite a shortage of vaccine, more than 2,500,000 of the city's 7,500,000 had been vaccinated. The city had appropriated $600,000 for smallpox fighting.

P: Passengers on every incoming plane and ship from France and India were vaccinated (as protection against reported smallpox outbreaks there).

P: A Puerto Rican sailor who had left Manhattan March 14 on an Army transport came down with smallpox in Bremerhaven. Manhattan officials promptly began a hunt for his Manhattan friends.

P: In New Jersey, Maine (where the Mexican's wife had gone), upstate New York, Philadelphia and Camden (where there was a smallpox death), the vaccination rush went into high gear.

P: New York's tabloid Daily News headlined: POX VACCINE . . . MAY SIDETRACK CUPID. The story: because vaccination sometimes causes a false positive Wassermann, vaccinated couples, required by state .aw to pass the Wassermann test before getting a marriage license, would have to delay their weddings until their vaccinations wear off.

P: In Harlem, a young woman named Sylvia Carol Steinberg, armed with hypodermics and vials, went briskly to work in a restaurant. Queues formed quickly. In two days, with her boy friend looking on admiringly, she had vaccinated 500 people. Suspicious cops finally hauled her into a police station, found that she had "vaccinated" everybody with water. Arraigned for "assault," she was packed off to a psychiatric ward.

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