Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89

[olivia-banks]

Paywall-free link: https://archive.today/Toq4Y

[m-hodges]

I don’t think many people know about or remember the 2003 smallpox vaccination campaign.¹

> The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_va...

[cucumber3732842]

[flagged]

[krisknez]

> According to the CDC, there have been no new smallpox cases since 1977.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...

[andrewflnr]

That's got to be one of the greatest legacies in all human history. No politician or other empire-builder comes close.

[jfengel]

And it comes at a time when a disease we were working on eliminating, measles, has come back and the US is about to lose its measles-free status.

It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.

[WalterBright]

Food produced by Fritz Haber's Haber-Bosch process (making fertilizer) supports about half of the world's population.

[s0rce]

Norman Borlaug probably comes close. H. Trendley Dean was also impactful on a large scale, while its seemingly less important it helps a lot of people.

[davidgay]

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur wins this one, though.

[gucci-on-fleek]

I completely agree, but to be fair, there are some people who are politicians and helped to eradicate a disease [0] [1].

[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guinea-worm-disease-nearly-erad...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis

[vkou]

Is there any way that people can work to re-introduce it into society? I know some folks are making a lot of progress with MMR.

[wesleywt]

Politicians and empire-builders (Elon) is currently standing in the way of human progress and history.

[deadbabe]

Genghis Khan??

[kwhat4]

Just in time to roll over in his grave.

[quesera]

Smallpox is not measles! But, point taken.

[sowbug]

And to see himself become the villain.

[octate]

He did a great service to humanity

[CaliforniaKarl]

I'm starting to think that we should be calling it "contained", not "eradicated". Eradication invites the question "Well then, why do we still need the vaccine?"

[rolph]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...

[dgacmu]

It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period.

The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.

(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)

[yen223]

Most people nowadays are not vaccinated against smallpox anymore

[ksenzee]

This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.

[quesera]

We don't vaccinate against smallpox, but keep in mind that at least two countries maintain live smallpox virus in government labs.

The bad actors are predictable. And I suspect at least two others are lying.

[webdoodle]

Except it wasn't eradicated. It's still stored at the US's Fort Detrick, and in Russian and Chinese bioweapons facilities, too be released as a bioweapon, now that no one has natural immunity anymore.

[MagicMoonlight]

If you don’t keep it then the first time you’ll get to study it will be when the first bodies are recovered from your cities.

[IshKebab]

It would be a pretty shoddy bioweapon considering you can't really target it and vaccines are available.

Maybe Russia or China are funding anti-vax idiots in the US so that it only affects America :-D

[tialaramex]

It might be possible to reintroduce Smallpox and I guess that idiots who also think coal is a good idea might actually be stupid enough to make it happen. But, fortunately humans did wipe out one other disease and unlike Smallpox it wasn't deemed useful as a biological weapon so AFAIK nobody kept copies, it's just gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest

[olivia-banks]

> Construction of an infectious horsepox virus vaccine from chemically synthesized DNA fragments

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?