People definitely thought that hygiene was the key to reducing smallpox... until 1970. Turns out, not so much the case. Sanitation helps but it's a fucking airborne virus.

Seriously, just think for a minute the sheer amount of work and secret-keeping that would have to go into the falsification of the eradication of polio/smallpox by vaccination. You can see the data clearly, you can blatantly detect virus samples in polio's case so you know it's not DDT or something else... and to what benefit? To use up some vaccine stock and never use it again, like in smallpox's case?

What's the benefit? What actually makes more sense: every single health worker for the past hundred+ years (vaccination is over 200 years old!) has been in on a giant conspiracy that all of them kept secret, or that they fucking work?