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When’s the last time you got a small pox or measles booster PIA?
When’s the last time you heard about a small pox case?

I've never got a smallpox vaccination, and neither have you. Very few people EVER got smallpox vaccinations. Dr. Jenner's innovation was to immunize with cowpox, a related virus. Modern vaccinations were actually vaccinia virus. And that vaccination had an initial effectiveness of about 95%. Some vaccinated people DID still get smallpox. It prevented most serious illness and death, EXACTLY like the current Covid vaccinations.

As for measles, I probably have an unmeasurable level of circulating antibodies because antibody level contraction is how the immune system works. But I bet I have memory T and B-cells that remember how to make measles antibodies. Most media is fixated on antibody levels, which always contract. This is not a defect in the vaccinations. It's a normal immune system feature. Evolution has selected for it, because it has positive survival value. It's just a lot easier to measure IgG levels than to run any of the other tests that tell you about a patient's immunity. But that doesn't mean it's the right test. That level just tells you they have some sort of antibody floating around. It may not be effective in binding SARS-COV2. It may not even be against SARS-COV2 at all! They can run binding assays against SARS-COV2, but they are rarely done.

Just like PCR tests telling us somebody has a lot of viral RNA in their nose: It's not measuring live virus, just certain RNA fragments. That may be because a lot of the virus has been destroyed by the immune system, and all that RNA coming out is not contagious. But labs are set up to run PCR tests en masse. It's relatively cheap when you do a lot of them at once. They could run plaque assays for live virus, but no medical labs do because it would be too expensive.

The reason I say mRNA vaccines are better than currently licensed alternatives is because of the rare thrombocytopenia events from adenovirus vaccines like J&J and AstraZeneca. These are not from the immunizing material. They are from the human or chimp adenovirus that carries the spike RNA segment into the cells. There is a clotting protein that can bind to the adenoviruses they used, and can cause some very bad clots. These have actually killed some people, so until they fix those adenoviruses I would not recommend those vaccines when we have mRNA vaccines without that problem. BTW: Some other existing vaccines (IE. Sputnik and Ebola) use adenovirus carriers.

Want to actually learn about viruses and the immune system? Here's the best link ever: microbe.tv They have several blogs, but the ones you need are TWiV and TWiM. This Week in Virology and This Week in Immunology respectively. They have been around quite a while. TWiV is on episode 844 and TWiM is on episode 256. Each episode is one or two hours long. The host, Dr. Racaniello also is teaching a virology course on line. You can take it for free, but do start at the beginning.

Educating anyone benefits everyone.