I just did a google search for "smallpox cases 2017". The only "hit" that resulted in a direct case was a researcher who accidentally got infected studying it. That was in 1978.

What does that prove? That vaccines work? Does that prove that it's efficacious, or that it eradicated the disease?

You'd think in this always-connected world of smartphones and internet connections there would be an immediate alarm and flow of news stories if it were on the loose again.

I did the same search for polio, and only turned up a few cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not particularly countries that have effective resources to combat such a disease.

Have you searched for what I pointed out? That polio was reclassified? There's numerous resources, that are still coming out on this, polio was reclassified, smallpox was eradicated by sanitation and improvements in living conditions, vaccines cause outbreaks of disease and the population was never vaccinated in such a way that vaccines could ever take credit for eliminating it. The same for mumps. Vaccines have caused more disease and death than the supposed things that they were fighting, and this is going on today with mumps still causing more deaths than the disease would. There has never been one safety study done on a specific vaccine, there have been statistical studies but not one study exemplifying why and how the vaccine is safe. There have never been any efficacy studies done on vaccines either. There have been libraries of research on vaccines, guess how many anti-vaccines ever went pro vaccine? There have been numerous virologists and people that were working actively to develop vaccines that had and continue to switch sides. For that matter of fact there have been hundreds of murders of microbiologists since 2001, while data like this still exemplifies why and how vaccines cannot work:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4160575/

It's apt as you're putting up strawmen of my "emotionally invested" self, when this study is "Not for the faint hearted".

A serious consequence of these facts is that an antibody against a defined antigen, e.g., a whole purified protein or a peptide, could bind to structurally related antigens that have a completely or partially different amino sequence (molecular mimicry). This means that, predicting an antibody has high affinity for the immunizing antigen is extremely difficult if not impossible.

It's got nothing to do with believing.