Educational Media Reviews Online

No one is currently immune to smallpox. All vaccines have worn off, yet it is the one disease that has killed the most people. Experts call it nearly invincible: even a single breath will pass it person to person. There is no cure. One third of those who are infected will die. The rest are usually disfigured. After 9/11 there still was not a movement for mass vaccination against smallpox but even so the video shows that the situation could be worse than we can imagine. By 1980 all countries that had samples of smallpox were to have destroyed them. The Soviets kept theirs. They worked on developing a strain that had no vaccine, as a last ditch weapon in case of a nuclear war. It was so deadly a vaccinated worker caught the virus 15 kilometers from the island it was tested on. To this day no foreign inspectors are allowed into their current facility in Russia.

The video moves ahead to Iraq and the Middle East before the last Gulf War. In 1998 inspectors found facilities with hundreds of eggs that are the medium for germ warfare incubating, such as smallpox. No firm program or evidence was ever found in Iraq. The expert consulted for this show is convinced the greatest threat is Russia, not Iraq or other terrorist groups. The producers fail to back this up with more evidence besides their history of covering the truth about germ warfare. It tries to develop hysteria over the threat of a smallpox attack, stating, "we are living on borrowed time". The earlier parts on the horrors of smallpox are interesting but it fails to make a case, if that was its intent, of an imminent attack by bio-terrorists. The docu-drama style and high price makes this film not recommended.