Two Bifurcated Needles used for Smallpox Vaccination

Two Bifurcated needles for use in smallpox vaccination, made in Europe, 1968.

Bifurcated needles were a simple means to deliver a smallpox vaccination. For this procedure, a small drop of smallpox vaccine is placed between the two prongs and approximately 15 small punctures are then made into the surface of the upper arm of the skin. The skin of the person to be vaccinated would not be disinfected beforehand as it could deactivate the vaccine.

The needles were easy to use and asy to sterilise, through boiling water or or passing through a flame and the technique could be easily learned, making widespread effective vaccination programmes possible. The needles were found to be more effecient and safer than so-called gun injectors and other more hi-tech jet injectors. Such needles were used as part of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) smallpox global eradication campaign. As a result of which, WHO officially announced that they had achieved their goal in 1980. However, small samples of the smallpox virus have been kept in government laboratories in both the USA and Russia, which has led to fears that these reference samples could be used as the raw material for biological weapons.