Do any of you more seasoned, wise people remember getting lined up like a herd of cattle in your elementary school hallway, and the nurse going down the line popping your upper arm with a needle gun that had 5 needles in one, and what that was for?

I’m just wondering if you’re talking about this

No, this was something different. I think all of those are one shot, with a regular needle. Or separate shots with separate needles. My kids got all of those.
This was one gun with a wheel of needles that snapped into your arm. My kids never got that as far as I can recall.
Also, as I said, polio vaccinations were given to us in sugar cubes.

They only did that to the defective ones that were selected for recycling. It was a highly concentrated cocktail of digestive enzymes.

It was for small pox. I still have the scar.

I agree @chyna. But why didn’t I get a scar?

^ because you’re not mortal? lol
Yep, small pox and remember the polio sugar cubes?

Maybe you left your scab alone. I, of course, didn’t. I had to pick at it.

I have the smallpox vaccine scar but it’s really faint. I hadn’t thought of it for years and had a hard time finding it.

The scar is an age indicator, because they stopped doing that one. So, you can lie about your age and get away with it.

They never vaccinated me in school, thank goodness! And I’ve never heard of it in the places we’ve lived. I certainly hope parents were given a “heads up” before they did it to their kids!

The parents knew. It was a “thing” like picture day. It was 100% participation, and nobody questioned it, well except kids.

Smallpox.
I knew a guy in the army who didn’t like those guns that inject instead of using a one-time-per needle. I explained to him that there was no needle in the gun, but that the medicine was injected into your skin under high hydraulic pressure that did the job of a needle. He just couldn’t buy that needleless notion!!!

I didn’t scar either, but it was a small pox vaccination. Not everyone scarred.

And no one under 45 has one anymore.

It was a combination of small pox and BCG vaccines. BCG stands for Bacillus Calmette-Guérin. The BCG vaccine is used to protect people from human tuberculosis.
I remember one girl in my class had a bad response to the TB portion.

@filmfann The US doesn’t give BCG. It never has in any compulsory way that I know of. When I say I know of, I guess maybe they gave it in some parts of the country that I’m unaware of. If you were given BCG that would mean TB testing with the tine test or ppd doesn’t work for you, it will always come up positive, in fact you shouldn’t have it done, because your reaction will get more and more severe over time to the test, and that you have to get a chest X-ray to check for TB. Standard practice in the US is to test for TB exposure, not to vaccinate.

Unless, all I can think is you were a guinea pig maybe? The US may have used populations in testing the vaccine, and then decided against distributing it? What year were you vaccinated? I don’t know if the US ever got to the point of human testing.

I had to google. This link shows information regarding BCG vaccine trials in the US.

Yes and no. My schools did do them but my mom would insist on taking us to the doctors first to get it done there and then she would show our immunization card to the school so they knew we wouldn’t need the shots. She would take all 5 of us in the summer to get a physical and our shots before school started. The nurses were not always very skilled in giving the shots.
As far as shots, are you talking about the one on the upper left arm that left a round mark?
I thought it was a TB vaccinations but I guess it may be small pox. My mom says we were all vaccinated from small pox. They stopped the small pox vaccination in 72. So I’m old enough to have gotten it. Since I do remember getting tested for tb every school year, I imagine that means I didn’t get the vaccination. My husband has 2 marks on his arms and because he had the TB vaccine, he showed up positive when he was small. They couldn’t rule out that it was a result of the vaccine and he had to be on medication for 6 months. After that he never had the test done because he was told he will probably always show up positive.

@JLeslie. Oakland, California about 1966. I remember it because of that false positive for TB.

@filmfann Do you come up positive when tested? I read a little and it looks like the study done in America wasn’t a very effective form of BCG, which is part of the reason the US chose not to vaccinate the population.

Mine was either in Florida or in my early years in Kansas. 1966 or so.

As some one pointed out, vaccinating all the kids in the schools went a LONG way toward eradicating or almost eliminating diseases. Until the idiot anti-vaxxers showed up.

Well, I didn’t know of any time in our history that we were vaccinating for TB nationally, I guess I might have been wrong, but even what I’ve read now implies we just did studies in some regions, and then decided America wouldn’t vaccinate because we had relatively few cases of TB. That’s very few cases even without vaccinating, and America didn’t feel confident in the efficacy of the BCG. TB is seen much much more in other countries. Even if we did vaccinate in the 60’s, we stopped. Not because it was eradicated, it’s not eradicated. In fact there has been more concern about TB in the last 10 years, and especially antibiotic resistant TB. I personally know a lot of people positive for the infection.

I think it was a test, not a vaccination.

I do not test positively. A girl in my class had a false positive.
My Mom lived with a woman who has TB, and afterwards she always falsely tested positive.

Didn’t happen to me, not in school, but the school required we go to a doctor and they always did that. I forget what they said it was for. TB maybe? They also tested and vaxed for and gave shots for other things – mumps, small pox, hepatitis, rabies?

@filmfann Your mom tested positive? So then she had It too. Not the illness, I mean the bacteria, or mycobacterium??

If you never tested positive, even within ten years of getting the shot, and you had the shot that either means you never had the shot and your memory is wrong, or the shot didn’t work. Since you seem to be very clear that it was BCG then I guess it didn’t give you immunity, which is exactly why America chose not to go forward with it. From what I read it looks like we used different BCG vaccine in testing than Europe did. I’m unclear about that. Ours was less effective.

Imagine that, a vaccine that was given that wasn’t working. That would be great for the anti-vaxxers schtick. They could say, government gave scarring vaccine that didn’t works and some kids became very sick from it. In fact the first trials of the vaccine in Germany did kill a bunch of infants. I don’t think it was given across the entire country though (USA), so that’s probably why the anti-vaccine people don’t mention it.

Now, I wish I did know the complete history in that vaccine in the US.

I think it was a test for TB and a vaccination for small pox, and the small pox is what caused the scar.