The Unlikely Adversaries that Eliminated Smallpox

During the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, the United States and Soviet Union, working through the United Nations World Health Organization, cooperated to eradicate smallpox.

The Russians provided 450 million doses of vaccine, while the Americans provided key financial and technical support; the WHO, as a global institution, helped bridge the two adversaries and coordinate their efforts.

By 1980, just two decades later, the world was free of smallpox—an ancient scourge that had killed up half a billion people over the last century alone; it remains the first and only human disease to be eradicated, and only the second infectious disease overall.

Pictured below are Viktor Zhdanov, the Soviet deputy minister of health who pushed the WHO in 1958 to take up the campaign to eradicate smallpox, and Bill Foege, chief of the CDC’s Smallpox Eradication Program, who developed the surveillance and ring vaccination strategy.

If only we and our current archrivals, China, had pulled off the same with COVID-19.