Smallpox Was Never Eradicated

An Essay

In 1976, two years after India was declared free of smallpox, surveillance teams fanned out across the country to search for remaining cases. They found suspected smallpox everywhere. When the cases were examined, 63% turned out to be chickenpox. The WHO’s own 1988 publication, Smallpox and Its Eradication, reported this figure and acknowledged that in some of these cases — severe adult chickenpox with lesions on the palms and soles — “it was impossible to be certain at any stage of the disease as to whether it was chickenpox or smallpox.” [1]

During the eradication program itself, the WHO’s solution was simple: all such ambiguous cases were classified as smallpox and treated accordingly. After the declaration of eradication in 1980, the same ambiguous cases were classified as something else — chickenpox, monkeypox, dermatitis, or any number of alternative labels. The disease didn’t vanish. The term did.

This is the argument at the centre of Kate Sugak’s documentary The Truth About Smallpox — that the eradication of smallpox, widely regarded as the crowning achievement of vaccination, was accomplished not through immunological triumph but through a slow, systematic reclassification of symptoms under new diagnostic labels. The evidence she assembles — drawn from WHO documents, historical medical journals, and the published admissions of physicians who struggled with these diagnoses for centuries — dismantles the eradication narrative piece by piece.

---

The standard account of smallpox assumes a stable target: a specific disease, caused by a specific virus, producing a specific set of symptoms, eradicated by a specific vaccine. Every link in that chain depends on the one before it. If the disease was never a stable diagnostic category — if the term “smallpox” referred to different things in different centuries, different countries, and different clinical settings — then the entire narrative of eradication requires re-examination.

The historical record does not support the idea of a stable category. A 1979 article published in Medical History, titled “Smallpox and the Evolution of Ideas on Acute Viral Infections,” laid this out plainly: “In trying to assess the influence wielded by smallpox on social and political history, or just to determine the chronology of the disease, one is hampered by the inability to identify the disease with any degree of certainty from extant descriptions before AD 900, and sometimes much later.” The same source noted that even when the Latin term variola first appeared in the historical record, “it was not accompanied by a clinical description, and we have no way of knowing whether or not it referred to smallpox.” [2]

For several hundred years after the introduction of the terms variola and morbilli (measles), the source continued, “the diseases they refer to can in no certain way be distinguished as smallpox and measles respectively, on the basis of the inadequate clinical descriptions.” [2]

This is not a fringe observation. The article published in the Infectious Disease Clinics of North America, titled “Smallpox and Measles: Historical Aspects and Clinical Differentiation,” confirmed that “for centuries, scarlet fever, rubella, measles, and smallpox were undifferentiated” — considered the same febrile diseases with rashes. [3]

The instability of these diagnostic terms stretches back far further than smallpox itself.

---

Support Independent Research

This work remains free because paid subscribers make it possible. If you find value here, consider joining them.

What paid subscribers get: Access to the Deep Dive Audio Library — 180+ in-depth discussions (30-50 min each) exploring the books behind these essays. New discussions added weekly. That’s 100+ hours of content for less than the price of a single audiobook.

[Upgrade to Paid – $5/month or $50/year]

Get in touch Essay ideas, stories, or expertise to share: unbekoming@outlook.com

---

The Long History of Elastic Disease Labels

In ancient Greece, the conceptual ancestor of Western medicine, any changes in the body or psyche were framed as defilement — miasma in Greek. The sick person was unclean. They had angered the gods. They were possessed. Contact with them could defile the healthy. It was this framework, rooted in religious punishment rather than biological observation, that produced the foundational Western idea of contagion.

Other ancient medical traditions did not share this assumption. Traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda contained no concept of disease transmission, because they never associated illness with divine punishment. The contagion model was a Western invention, and from the beginning it served a dual purpose: explaining suffering and controlling populations. A person declared unclean could be removed from society. Their rights, property, family, and social existence could be stripped away under the authority of religious and medical judgment.

In the Middle Ages, the operative term was leprosy. The symptoms of what was called leprosy shifted constantly — to the point where a person with no symptoms at all could be declared a leper. Medical tribunals, documented in urban chronicles from the 11th century onward, gave priests and city councilors the power to decide whether a person was leprous and should be expelled to a leper colony. A person could be diagnosed with leprosy for hair loss, acne, swelling, or goosebumps in response to a draught. One diagnostic test checked whether nightmares gave you goosebumps. Another was the “singing test.” You could be declared a leper if you laughed or sang too much, if you were suspected of witchcraft, or if you had had contact with someone already declared leprous. [4]

The consequences were total. Lepers were tattooed, forced to wear distinctive clothing, and required to carry a bell so their presence could be heard before they were seen. They lost all societal rights and community protection. They were separated from their families. A funeral mass was conducted for them — they were socially dead while still alive. The German word for leprosy, Aussatz, translates as exile.

Leprosy was not a specific disease. It was a collective term applied to nearly any condition — respiratory, dermatological, or otherwise — and it functioned as a tool of exclusion.

In the 13th century, the term leprosy was replaced by plague, which served the same function. Plague never had a consistent symptomatology. It varied by region and by year, depending on which symptoms happened to be most prevalent. Even today, plague appears in the medical literature in multiple forms — pneumonic, bubonic, septicemic — and not all historical epidemics labelled “plague” correspond to the disease that carries that name in modern medicine. [4]

The church, which controlled both spiritual and medical authority, used plague declarations to manage populations. Entire neighbourhoods could be sealed in quarantine. People could be starved and killed under the justification that they were sinners being punished. Those who fell ill were subjected to forced treatment with mercury compounds — a practice so dreaded that medical historians tell us people did everything possible to hide their symptoms rather than fall into the hands of the authorities. Sickness of any kind was interpreted as a failure of faith.

This is the lineage from which smallpox emerged as a diagnostic category. The term “smallpox” — variola, or pox (the lesser evil) — distinguished it from the “great pox” (morbus, the greater evil), which referred to syphilis. Syphilis itself was another collective term, applied to people suspected of sexual sin. Under the Vatican’s virginity dogma, sexuality was defilement, and any condition associated with it — real or presumed — attracted not only social stigma but mercury treatments that disfigured the skin, compounding the very symptoms the treatments were supposed to address. This framework gave rise to the category of “venereal diseases,” which governments have maintained in evolving forms ever since.

Smallpox, by contrast, was the term applied to skin symptoms unrelated to sexuality. In some regions, it also encompassed respiratory conditions and even cancerous tumours. Illustrations from the 13th through the 16th centuries do not clearly depict the diseases we now associate with these terms — modern medical historians frequently disagree on whether a given illustration was meant to depict leprosy, smallpox, or plague. One of the earliest books on smallpox, from the early 16th century, features a depiction of the biblical character Job, who in the scriptures suffered from leprosy. The symptoms we associate with smallpox today are not visible in this image. [4]

From Demons to Toxins: The Birth of “Virus”

As the power of the Vatican declined — eroded by centuries of abuse, arbitrary authority, and Inquisition — the religiously motivated explanations for disease lost their credibility. But the power structure adapted. What replaced the religious framework was not a fundamentally different model but a materialist translation of the same idea, administered by the same type of authority. Doctors assumed the position that priests had occupied. The state, which had always managed the training and credentialing of the priestly medical class, simply transferred that function to the new secular one — and suppressed independent practitioners, especially those whose therapeutic approaches worked.

The demon of disease became the toxin of disease. Where priests had identified supernatural entities as the cause of illness, doctors now pointed to material substances. The Latin word for this supposed disease-causing toxin was virus — which originally meant simply “poison.” People came to believe that the body recovered from disease by producing an antidote to this poison.

This belief was reinforced by an observable phenomenon: a person who regularly consumed small amounts of a poison, such as alcohol, could survive doses that would kill someone with no prior exposure. People who feared assassination took poisons preventively, believing their bodies were manufacturing antidotes. The actual mechanism — the liver producing enzymes to metabolise and neutralise specific toxins — was not understood. The misinterpretation gave rise to the practice of variolation: introducing the secretions of sick people into healthy people through skin incisions, on the theory that the body would produce an “antidote” to the disease.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was trained as a doctor, described the consequences of mercury-based treatment in Part One of Faust. In the passage, the character describes how he and his father administered a mercury mixture to patients during an epidemic:

“There, a mercurial suitor, the Red Lion, would in a taped bath be married to the Lily; then both be driven by tormenting flames out of one bridal chamber to another. When in the beaker the young Queen at last appeared a massive colour — that was our medicine. The patients died, and no one thought to ask if anyone was healed... And so, with diabolical electuary, we ravaged in these hills and valleys with greater fury than the plague. I have myself dosed thousands with the poison; they wasted away, and I must live to hear the brazen murderers praised.” [5]

The one to one-and-a-half litres of salivation per day caused by mercury treatment was considered a positive sign — interpreted as the body releasing the poison of the disease. The survivors, as Goethe noted with horror, praised their poisoners as saviours.

This lineage matters because it exposes the conceptual architecture behind vaccination. The idea that the body produces an antidote to disease — which became the modern concept of antibodies and immunity — did not arise from careful scientific observation. It arose from a misunderstanding of liver enzyme function, layered onto the older religious framework of pollution and purification. Variolation was the practical expression of this misunderstanding. Vaccination institutionalised it — and the institutions that profit from it have had no interest in correcting the error.

The Reclassification Machine

The introduction of variolation, and later vaccination, against smallpox created a problem that has never been resolved. When people who had been variolated or vaccinated subsequently developed the very symptoms that would previously have been called smallpox, the response was not to question the procedure. It was to look for minute differences in symptoms that could justify a different diagnosis.

This is the mechanism by which the single, broad term “smallpox” — which had encompassed all conditions accompanied by rashes — was progressively fractured into an expanding list of separate labels: chickenpox, measles, monkeypox, scarlet fever, rubella, herpes, erythema multiforme, molluscum contagiosum, impetigo, dermatitis, and others. Each new label absorbed cases that would formerly have been counted as smallpox. Each new label also became its own revenue stream — with its own drugs, therapies, and vaccines.

The people who architect these systems know what they are doing. The timing is not ambiguous. New diagnostic labels appear precisely when vaccination failures need to be concealed. Diagnostic criteria are rewritten on specific dates to coincide with vaccine rollout. The WHO’s own publications document the diagnostic confusion — the first chapter of Smallpox and Its Eradication contains a long list of conditions with which smallpox was confused at the time of diagnosis, and acknowledges that smallpox could not be diagnosed on symptoms alone [1] — but the confusion was not an unfortunate side effect. It was the mechanism. Each new label absorbed cases that would have exposed the vaccine as ineffective, and each new label generated its own pharmaceutical market. The reclassification was not institutional drift. It was engineered.

The pattern is not unique to smallpox. On May 12, 1955, coinciding with the introduction of polio vaccination in the United States, the diagnostic criteria for polio were changed. Symptoms that had previously been grouped under the polio label were redistributed to other diagnoses — aseptic meningitis, enterovirus — and the new criteria required that paralysis be present for more than 60 days before a polio diagnosis could be made. Reported polio cases in the US dropped from 50,000-60,000 per year to several hundred. [6]

The mechanism works in reverse as well. COVID-19 was created by collapsing multiple respiratory symptom categories that had previously been tracked under separate labels into a single collective term. The people who control diagnostic frameworks start epidemics by combining labels and end them by splitting labels apart.

Measles: The First Fracture

The first recorded attempt to distinguish measles from smallpox came from the 9th-century Persian physician Rhazes, whose Treatise on Smallpox and Measles is considered a classic of clinical medicine. His proposed differentiation rested on marginal differences in the severity of specific symptoms: back pain was said to be more pronounced in smallpox, while nausea and restlessness were more prominent in measles. Apart from these slight variations, both conditions shared the same constellation of symptoms — fever, rash, respiratory involvement, malaise. [7]

A century later, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) wrote in The Canon of Medicine that “the physical signs of measles are almost the same as those of smallpox, but nausea and inflammation are more severe, although the back pain is less.” Other Persian physicians of the same era — al-Masudi and Ibn Zuhr — considered smallpox and measles the same disease entirely. There was no consensus. [7]

The diagnostic confusion persisted for a thousand years. Sir William Osler, the renowned Canadian clinician working in the late 19th century, described case after case of misdiagnosis. A young man admitted with a diagnosis of smallpox turned out to have measles. A child believed to have smallpox proved to have measles. Another patient diagnosed with measles turned out to have — as Osler realised with alarm — severe smallpox. “The general condition of the patient and the nature of the prodromal symptoms,” Osler wrote, “are often better guides than the character of the rash.” [3]

The WHO’s 1988 publication confirmed the pattern at scale: “In countries in which smallpox was endemic, physicians were often prone to diagnose all outbreaks of rash associated with deaths as smallpox and to report them as such to the health authorities. Some of these outbreaks later proved to be due to measles.” In non-endemic countries, the reverse applied — early smallpox cases were sometimes diagnosed as measles. [1]

The symptoms were non-specific. The overlap was enormous. The diagnosis depended less on biology than on geography, context, and the physician’s expectations.

Chickenpox: An Invented Distinction

The first person to formally separate chickenpox from smallpox was the English physician William Heberden, in a report published in 1767. Before Heberden, no one had proposed that these were distinct diseases. The Latin term varicella (chickenpox) derives from variola (smallpox) and had simply referred to a mild course of smallpox. [2]

Heberden’s own report, when examined in detail, makes a stronger case for the unity of the two conditions than for their separation. He acknowledged that chickenpox pustules were the same size as those of smallpox, that they contained a yellowish fluid resembling smallpox, and that the preceding symptoms — chills, fatigue, cough, insomnia, migratory pains, loss of appetite, and fever — were shared by both conditions. He tried to claim that chickenpox did not leave scars, but then conceded that it could if the pustules were scratched or sufficiently severe. His primary evidence for two distinct diseases was a difference in the timing of crust formation on the pustules — whether the crust appeared by day five or later. [2]

Heberden noted that many experts in his own field considered chickenpox and smallpox the same condition. He acknowledged that due to the “great similarity,” cases of chickenpox were frequently mistaken for smallpox. He stated his reason for proposing the separation: to prevent the public from assuming that a bout of chickenpox made them immune to smallpox, which would reduce uptake of the smallpox vaccine. [2]

His proposal was not accepted for over a century. When it was finally adopted in the early 1900s, medical journals were filled with chapters and letters about the difficulty of distinguishing the two conditions.

A letter published in the British Medical Journal on December 1, 1923, from a physician working in Sudan, captured the diagnostic reality on the ground:

“I have no doubt in my mind that I have seen an epidemic which has passed through these three stages: indistinguishable from chickenpox, and that often of a mild type; alastrim; and finally typical smallpox... I am now convinced smallpox can appear in such a form that any doctor would diagnose it as chickenpox, basing his diagnosis on distribution, the appearance in crops, the presence of all stages of the eruption at one and the same time, and the absence of severe constitutional or septic symptoms in patients unprotected by previous vaccination.” [8]

Another physician, responding in the same journal, wrote: “Many so-called distinguishing characteristics are quoted in textbooks, but all of them may fail and leave one in perplexity.” The distinguishing signs he listed included such minute criteria as whether vesicles collapsed when punctured in one place only — showing them to be unilocular. [8]

In a 1923 article published in the British Medical Journal, titled “Diagnosis of Smallpox and Chickenpox: A Contrast,” a striking incident was recounted involving William Osler. Several prominent physicians at Johns Hopkins University diagnosed a patient as having a severe case of chickenpox. Osler, arriving with thirty to forty students and doctors in tow, took one look at the patient and exclaimed: “My God, Futcher, don’t you know smallpox when you see it?” [8]

The most experienced physicians in the world could not agree on what they were looking at. That is the foundation on which “eradication” was built.

Monkeypox: A Convenient Arrival

The WHO announced its campaign to eradicate smallpox through mass vaccination in 1958. That same year, a new disease was identified: monkeypox. In 1970, the monkeypox virus was reported to have jumped to humans for the first time — in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where smallpox had been declared eradicated two years earlier. [1]

The WHO’s 1988 publication stated that monkeypox in humans “usually presents as smallpox” and that the only distinguishing clinical sign was enlarged lymph nodes, seen in most monkeypox cases but not in smallpox. [1]

Three subsequent publications dismantled even this distinction. A November 2020 publication noted that lymph nodes are “usually, though not always, enlarged” in monkeypox — meaning the one distinguishing feature was inconsistent. [9] A 2018 publication stated that swollen lymph nodes were “not usually seen in smallpox” but had nevertheless been observed — meaning the distinguishing feature also appeared in the disease it was supposed to distinguish from. [10] A 2012 publication went further, noting that lymphadenopathy “has not been well described for smallpox because little attention has been paid to this symptom,” and that enlargement and hyperaemia of the lymph nodes had in fact been observed in smallpox cases. The same publication acknowledged that monkeypox cases were “most likely diagnosed as smallpox” before 1970 — that is, it was the same disease until someone decided it wasn’t. [11]

Lymphadenopathy also appears in chickenpox. A clinical study comparing chickenpox in children and adults found that “lymphadenopathy in children was generalized but was detected less frequently than in patients older than 18 years.” [12]

The sole clinical feature that was supposed to separate monkeypox from smallpox — lymph node enlargement — turns out to be inconsistently present in monkeypox, occasionally present in smallpox, and also present in chickenpox. It is not a distinguishing feature. It is a shared feature that was selectively emphasised to justify a new diagnostic label.

The expansion of that label continues. The US Centers for Disease Control stated that recent monkeypox cases have “differed from what doctors have observed in the past,” with some patients developing only a single pimple or blister rather than a widespread rash. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a briefing that “tiny bumps on the skin” could be the only indication of infection, and advised that any unexplained rash or skin condition — “anywhere on your body, including in your mouth” — should be evaluated. [13]

Any pimple on your face can now be monkeypox. This is not a narrowing of diagnostic criteria. It is a return to the original, pre-modern definition of smallpox — in which any skin symptom could qualify.

The Virology Problem

The entire edifice of smallpox eradication depends not only on stable diagnostic categories but on the existence of the variola virus itself. If the virus exists, was isolated, and was characterized, then diagnostic tests can be calibrated against it, vaccines can be developed to target it, and its eradication can be verified. If it was never properly isolated, the entire chain collapses.

The word virus originally meant poison or toxin — any substance or agent thought to cause disease. The modern concept of a virus as a submicroscopic particle containing nucleic acid did not emerge until 1954. The claim that such particles have been found in humans, isolated in pure form, biochemically characterized, and photographed is the foundation of virology as a field.

In 1887, Dr. John Buist, in his book Vaccinia and Variola: A Study of Their Life History, described attempts to visualise the vaccinia virus under a microscope — while still assuming it to be a bacterium. [14] The modern idea of what a virus looks like and how it functions was decades away. But the term was already in use, carrying forward its older meaning of a disease-causing substance.

A 1947 publication titled “The Isolation and Cultivation of Variola Virus on the Chorioallantoic Membrane of Chick Embryos” illustrates the methodology that passes for isolation in virology. The researchers took samples from sick patients, mixed them with beef broth and antibiotics, drilled a hole in the eggshell of a live chicken embryo, injected the mixture onto the chorioallantoic membrane, sealed the hole with wax and paraffin, and after 72 hours opened the egg to examine the membrane. When they observed white dot-like lesions on the membrane, they concluded this proved the presence of the smallpox virus. [15]

They did not extract purified viral particles from the patient. They did not obtain a pure sample. They did not perform biochemical characterisation of any isolated entity. What they did was inject a complex mixture of biological material, antibiotics, and other substances into a living embryo and observe damage to the membrane. The membrane lesions could have resulted from the antibiotics, from heavy metals used in the histological fixation process, from the foreign material injected, or from the trauma of the procedure itself. No control experiments were performed — no injection of material from healthy individuals, no injection of saline alone — to determine whether the same lesions would appear in the absence of supposedly infectious material. [15]

A 1993 publication reported that Russian scientists had sequenced the genome of the smallpox virus. Their description of the isolation process stated that “variola major virus, India-1967, was isolated by specialists of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Smallpox and Related Infections in Moscow, by titration of the material from a patient from India on chorioallantoic membranes of chicken embryos in 1967.” The method described is the same chicken embryo procedure — which is not an isolation in any standard scientific sense. The publication further stated that “virions were purified by differential centrifugation and viral DNA was isolated by phenol-chloroform extraction” — but provided no evidence of purified virions, no electron micrographs of the purified particles, and no control experiments to establish that the genetic sequences designated as “viral” did not originate from the host material. [16]

In every other field of biology, isolation means obtaining a pure sample of the entity in question, separated from all other material, and characterising it independently. In virology, the term has been redefined to mean observing indirect effects in a complex, uncontrolled experimental system — and claiming these effects as proof of the presence of a specific agent.

Diagnostic tests require reference standards — purified samples of the target agent against which the test can be calibrated. If no pure virus has ever been isolated, no valid reference standard exists, and every test calibrated against non-existent standards is, by definition, scientifically invalid.

In 2001, when European countries and the United States began stockpiling millions of doses of smallpox vaccine in response to bioterrorism fears, Dr. Stefan Lanka made a formal request to the World Health Organization for photographs of the smallpox virus taken from patient samples. The WHO referred him to two publications containing images of white dots that the authors claimed were variola virions — but without any biochemical analysis demonstrating that the photographed objects were in fact a virus. [17]

On January 1, 2003, Lanka announced a €10,000 reward for anyone who could provide a scientific publication demonstrating the isolation of the smallpox virus or the vaccinia virus — purified of all foreign components, biochemically characterised, and accompanied by a photograph of the isolated virus. In 2003, the vaccinia virus was one of the most studied entities in virology. The reward required nothing more than producing an existing publication and submitting it. No one claimed the reward. [17]

A separate reward of €1.5 million for scientific evidence of the existence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has similarly gone unclaimed for over two years. [17]

What Actually Causes Skin Rashes

If the virus does not exist as claimed, the question remains: what produces the skin symptoms that have been labelled smallpox, chickenpox, monkeypox, and so on?

The documentary’s answer is that skin rashes represent a detoxification process — the body’s mechanism for expelling accumulated waste and toxins through the skin when the primary excretory channels (urination, defecation, sweating, and respiration) are overwhelmed.

The process works as follows. Metabolic waste products, nutritional acid residues, and environmental toxins accumulate in the interstitial fluid and enter the blood plasma through hydrostatic pressure. When the lymphatic system and the four primary excretory pathways cannot adequately handle the load, the body recruits the skin as an additional elimination route. The skin fibres become congested and swollen, the glands and lymph vessels in the affected area become engorged, and the waste is expelled through the skin tissue. The nature and appearance of the resulting rash depends on what the body is attempting to eliminate. Any medical toxicology reference demonstrates the range of skin manifestations produced by different toxic exposures — confirmation that the skin is heavily involved in detoxification across a wide variety of substances.

Children are particularly prone to skin rashes for physiological reasons. The bone growth process generates substantial metabolic waste. During periods of rapid growth, skin tissue does not keep pace with bone tissue, leaving children with relatively lower levels of collagen in their skin. This makes the skin a preferential route for waste elimination. When a child’s body must simultaneously process metabolic waste from growth, toxins from a poor diet, insufficient sunlight and vitamin D production, environmental pollutants, or psychological stress, and when the other excretory organs are weakened or overburdened, the skin symptoms will be more pronounced.

The observation that children in the same family or social group often develop rashes at the same time — taken as evidence of contagion — has a simpler explanation. Children in close proximity share not only the biological processes of growth but also the same diet, the same environmental exposures, the same air and water quality, and often the same emotional stresses. They go through similar biological processes in synchrony because they are subject to the same conditions. Children who do not share the same toxic load — who spend more time outdoors, eat differently, and experience less psychological stress — will process their metabolic waste without noticeable symptoms, regardless of how much contact they have with symptomatic children.

The severe skin conditions photographed in colonial-era populations — the images most often used to illustrate smallpox — become explicable without any virus. Poverty, chronic malnutrition, exhaustion, psychological stress, contaminated water and food, toxic pharmaceutical treatments, and medical experimentation — all well-documented features of colonial conditions — are precisely the factors that would overwhelm the body’s normal detoxification pathways and produce severe dermatological symptoms in large groups of people simultaneously. The narrative of a killer virus provided a convenient explanation that absolved colonial authorities of responsibility for the conditions that actually produced the suffering.

Looking back to 18th-century Europe, when severe skin rashes were common enough to motivate Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine, the population was enduring brutal wars, natural disasters including floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions that blocked sunlight for months. The resulting mass starvation and deficiencies of vitamin D, iron, and potassium — all essential for optimal skin function — combined with mercury-based medical treatments and pervasive psychological stress, produced exactly the conditions under which the skin would be recruited for emergency detoxification.

The medical establishment sells a different story, and the reason is not intellectual disagreement — it is money. The standard model posits an immune system engaged in constant warfare against microbial invaders — bacteria, fungi, and viruses conceived as invisible terrorists. This model sustains a trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. Without invisible pathogens, there is nothing to vaccinate against, nothing to develop antiviral drugs for, nothing to justify the permanent emergency that keeps public health budgets flowing. What we actually have, the documentary argues, is a cleansing and regenerative system. The body is in a constant process of cleaning and repairing tissues. Bacteria and fungi participate in this process — they are collaborators, not enemies.

The “flat type” smallpox depicted in historical photographs — where pustules do not develop and the upper epidermis flakes off as in a burn, accompanied by fever, flu-like symptoms, and a mortality rate of 30-70% — bears a striking resemblance to what modern dermatology calls toxic epidermal necrolysis. Toxic epidermal necrolysis is caused by pharmaceutical drugs and other toxic substances. If the smallpox virus does not exist, flat type smallpox was severe intoxication — poisoning — and its predominance in photographs of colonial populations is entirely consistent with the toxic exposures those populations endured.

The Method Behind the Labels

The documentary articulates a principle that, once understood, reframes the entire history of epidemic disease management.

Epidemics are ended by splitting one collective term into many smaller labels and by narrowing diagnostic criteria. Epidemics are started by the reverse operation — combining many separate labels into one collective term and broadening diagnostic criteria.

Smallpox was ended by fragmentation. What had been one disease became chickenpox, measles, monkeypox, scarlet fever, rubella, herpes, impetigo, dermatitis, and a dozen other labels. The symptoms didn’t change. The words changed.

Polio was ended by redefinition. On a specific date — May 12, 1955 — the diagnostic criteria changed to require paralysis lasting more than 60 days. Cases dropped from tens of thousands to hundreds.

COVID-19 was started by aggregation. Respiratory symptoms previously tracked under separate labels were combined under one term, and diagnostic criteria were broadened to the point where a positive PCR test — regardless of symptoms — constituted a case.

Monkeypox is being expanded by the same mechanism. The CDC now states that a single pimple or blister, anywhere on the body including the mouth, can constitute monkeypox — returning to the pre-modern breadth of the original smallpox definition.

The pattern is consistent. The mechanism is the same. Only the direction changes, depending on whether the objective is to declare victory or declare emergency.

What Remains

Public health will only improve as the quality of life improves. Health is a direct function of how we live — what we eat, what we breathe, how much sunlight we receive, how much toxic exposure we endure, what medications we take, and what emotional stresses we carry. The belief in viruses and contagion obscures these relationships. It prevents people from identifying and eliminating the actual physical and psychological factors that produce their symptoms. Billions are spent on vaccination programs, and when the same symptoms reappear under new labels, the real causes remain unaddressed — not because no one is looking for them, but because looking for them would collapse the entire pharmaceutical model. The causes are deliberately obscured.

To understand why any group of people develops symptoms — whether one person or a population — requires analysing the toxicological and psychosomatic factors that preceded the onset. It requires asking what changed in their environment, their diet, their exposure to chemicals and pharmaceuticals, their water supply, their sunlight exposure, their emotional state. These are questions that the virus-and-contagion framework is designed to prevent. It already has its answer — an invisible pathogen did it — and that answer protects every institution and industry built on top of it.

The smallpox virus has never been isolated from a patient sample in the way that “isolation” is understood in every other branch of science. The diagnostic category of smallpox was never stable. The symptoms that carried that label for centuries are still present in the population — they just carry different labels now. The eradication of smallpox was real in only one sense: the word was successfully retired. The conditions it described were not.

---

References

[1] Fenner, F., Henderson, D.A., Arita, I., Ježek, Z., & Ladnyi, I.D. (1988). Smallpox and Its Eradication. World Health Organization.

[2] Razzell, P. (1979). “Smallpox and the Evolution of Ideas on Acute Viral Infections.” Medical History, 23(1).

[3] Gruenberg, J.C. “Smallpox and Measles: Historical Aspects and Clinical Differentiation.” Infectious Disease Clinics of North America.

[4] Historical accounts of leprosy tribunals, plague diagnostics, and medieval disease classification are documented in urban chronicles from the 11th century onward, as referenced in Sugak, K., The Truth About Smallpox (documentary).

[5] Goethe, J.W. von. Faust, Part One. The passage on mercury treatment appears in the Easter Walk scene.

[6] Changes to polio diagnostic criteria following the introduction of the Salk vaccine on May 12, 1955, including the requirement for paralysis lasting more than 60 days, are documented in US public health records of the period.

[7] Rhazes (Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi). Treatise on Smallpox and Measles (9th century). Ibn Sina (Avicenna). The Canon of Medicine (11th century). Al-Masudi, Treatise on the Art of Medicine. Ibn Zuhr, Kitab al-Taisir (published in Latin as Theisir).

[8] Letters and articles published in the British Medical Journal, December 1923, including “Diagnosis of Smallpox and Chickenpox: A Contrast” and correspondence on alastrim and mild smallpox. The Osler anecdote involving Dr. Futcher at Johns Hopkins is recounted in the same source.

[9] Publication from November 2020 on human monkeypox clinical presentation, noting that lymph nodes are “usually, though not always, enlarged.”

[10] Publication from 2018 noting that swollen lymph nodes are “not usually seen in smallpox” but have been observed, as referenced in Sugak, K., The Truth About Smallpox.

[11] Publication from 2012 on lymphadenopathy in smallpox and monkeypox, noting that the symptom was poorly described in smallpox due to inadequate clinical attention, and that monkeypox cases were likely diagnosed as smallpox prior to 1970.

[12] Clinical study comparing chickenpox in children and adults, noting generalized lymphadenopathy in paediatric cases, as referenced in Sugak, K., The Truth About Smallpox.

[13] CDC briefings on monkeypox, including statements by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Demetre Daskalakis, Director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, regarding expanded symptom presentation.

[14] Buist, J. (1887). Vaccinia and Variola: A Study of Their Life History. London: Churchill.

[15] “The Isolation and Cultivation of Variola Virus on the Chorioallantoic Membrane of Chick Embryos” (1947).

[16] Shchelkunov, S.N., et al. (1993). Genome sequencing of variola major virus, India-1967 strain. WHO Collaborating Centre on Smallpox and Related Infections, Moscow.

[17] Lanka, S. (2003). €10,000 reward announcement for scientific proof of the existence of smallpox virus or vaccinia virus. The €1.5 million reward for evidence of SARS-CoV-2 is separately documented.

---

Book: Medicalized Motherhood: From First Pill to Permanent Patient

Available as a free download. 123 interventions documented across six phases—from pre-conception capture through postpartum surveillance. Includes practical tools: birth plan template, provider interview questions, quick reference card, and a new chapter on interrupting the cascade. Download it, share it with someone facing their first prenatal appointment, their induction date, their cesarean recommendation. The cascade works because women don’t see it coming. This book makes it visible.

Download the free PDF here

Support Independent Research

This work remains free because paid subscribers make it possible. If you find value here, consider joining them.

What paid subscribers get: Access to the Deep Dive Audio Library — 180+ in-depth discussions (30-50 min each) exploring the books behind these essays. New discussions added weekly. That’s 100+ hours of content for less than the price of a single audiobook.

[Upgrade to Paid – $5/month or $50/year]

Get in touch Essay ideas, stories, or expertise to share: unbekoming@outlook.com

New Biology Clinic

For those of you looking for practitioners who actually understand terrain medicine and the principles we explore here, I want to share something valuable. Dr. Tom Cowan—whose books and podcasts have shaped much of my own thinking about health—has created the New Biology Clinic, a virtual practice staffed by wellness specialists who operate from the same foundational understanding. This isn’t about symptom suppression or the conventional model. It’s about personalized guidance rooted in how living systems actually work. The clinic offers individual and family memberships that include not just private consults, but group sessions covering movement, nutrition, breathwork, biofield tuning, and more. Everything is virtual, making it accessible wherever you are. If you’ve been searching for practitioners who won’t look at you blankly when you mention structured water or the importance of the extracellular matrix, this is worth exploring. Use discount code “Unbekoming” to get $100 off the member activation fee. You can learn more and sign up at newbiologyclinic.com