Smallpox killed roughly 300 million people in the twentieth century alone. More than every war combined. It had been killing humans for at least 3,000 years — Egyptian mummies show its scars. It wiped out entire civilizations in the Americas. It blinded. It disfigured. It took children by the millions. There was no cure.
In 1967, the World Health Organization launched a campaign that most experts thought was impossible: eliminate the disease entirely from the face of the earth. Not reduce it. Not manage it. End it. They deployed vaccinators to every country, every village, every settlement on the planet. Workers trekked through jungles, crossed deserts, navigated civil wars. In Bangladesh, teams went house to house during monsoons. In Ethiopia, they vaccinated nomadic tribes who had never seen a needle. In India, 100,000 health workers searched for cases across a subcontinent of 600 million people.
On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated. It was the first — and still the only — human disease ever completely eliminated from nature. The last natural case had occurred in a hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin, who survived.
Humanity looked at its oldest killer and said: no more. Then it did the work to make it true.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."