https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/09/07/jim-jordan-vaccine-unamerican-washington/ -> Neither archive.* nor web.archive.org are working for me right now? >But critics were quick to pan Jordan’s Labor Day message as being off — way off — by nearly two and a half centuries. History shows that George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War, made the bold decision in 1777 to require his troops to be immunized after a smallpox outbreak devastated the nation. Meanwhile, reality; >The smallpox vaccine, introduced by Edward Jenner in 1796, was the first successful vaccine to be developed. He observed that milkmaids who previously had caught cowpox did not catch smallpox and showed that inoculated vaccinia protected against inoculated variola virus.