It's worth comparing it to outcomes across the many different vaccines given to protect against the manifold diseases that occur around the world. I'm sure the smallpox vaccine is responsible for a handful of deaths, but it has eradicated smallpox, a disease that was responsible for somewhere between 300-500 million deaths.
Now it appears that the only argument is if we should retain samples just in case it re-emerges. Since nobody has been able to establish the precise source, it's a difficult question.
What we do know is that Edward Jenner was the first person to discover that infection with the much less serious disease, cowpox, engendered immunity from smallpox. That we do recognize as being a zoonotic disease.
Polio is another disease that was still prevalent in my grandparents lifetime and on reflection, still reasonably common in my parents youth. Again, vaccine injury was still a real risk but a tiny risk when compared to the devastation the disease produced.
If you're open minded enough to consider other possibilities, or even just interested in the history, I
highly recommend reading the book 'Dissolving Illusions' by S. Humphries. There is another narrative to all of this isn't taught through the education system, because the mainstream paradigm is completely focused on a 'germ theory' narrative - the reasons for this are a topic in itself. In the book she does a fantastic job of proposing another narrative using the recorded historical conditions and statistical data (deaths) from official sources.
There are publicly available historical graphs that show the rates of the various diseases and their respective deaths, and for all of them the graphs were already trending towards zero (or basically at zero) before the respective vaccines were introduced - Scarlet Fever excluded because it had no vaccine yet also disappeared despite it being one of the big pandemic killers in past centuries. Smallpox is the same too, it was already heavily trending down towards zero before the WHO launched its global campaign to eradicate it. Measles was basically at zero deaths in the UK and USA, 96% and 99% reductions respectively if I remember correctly, before the vaccination campaign even began - the culprit is Vitamin A deficiency, even the WHO recognizes the link between severe cases and deficiency. Deficiency in vitamins/minerals is one of the defining factors in relation to disease also. We've just seen this again with Covid (respiratory conditions) and Vitamin D deficiency. This ties back in with the pandemics of the past and the horrendously deficient diets of the masses.
The fact this is true, and it is, means there was clearly other factors responsible. Clean water, better food quality and variety, decreasing pollution, increased sanitation, better living and work standards. That one sentence doesn't even convey the magnitude of the changes, and the book does a great job of expounding just how hellish things really were for people. When you get a sense of the battery farm conditions people were living in, it really does seem clear why we suffered so many pandemics and epidemics.
As for vaccination, I have seen it highlighted that both the Indian's and Chinese were utilizing primitive forms of vaccination before the West was and that it was Jesuit missionaries who brought the idea back to the West to their private libraries. I forget the name of the Jesuit who brought it back, but I did find a specific name (and quotation) from his writings about the matter.
For Polio (Mad-cow) there is good evidence to suggest these were the result of industrial poisoning, and not viral disease. Polio is connected with DDT and Lead Arsenate, and Mad-Cow with the organophosphate 'Phosmet'. A few years ago there was only Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan that had remaining 'wild' Polio cases, and these countries just happen to still either use DDT directly (Malaria control) or have old stocks that continue to percolate through the farming communities due to the lax policing.
