Smallpox has been one of the deadliest diseases in world history. Widespread vaccination programs were deployed in the early twentieth century. As countries found themselves seemingly free of this killer that took one in three victims, some complacency may have set in.
So when Alexei Kokorekin showed up to a hospital in Moscow with symptoms some doctors hadn’t seen outside of textbooks, they did everything short of burning it all to the fucking ground to end every last case of smallpox one last time.
Today’s Moment of Science… the 1959 Moscow Smallpox Epidemic that Wasn’t.
Smallpox wasn’t just the first disease for which we had a functional vaccine, we have the smallpox inoculation to thank for the word “vaccine.’ Roughly derived from the Latin word for ‘cow,’ you’re granted immunity to smallpox when you get immunity to the much less dangerous cowpox. The term ‘vaccinate’ managed to stick around.
Through the early twentieth century before the worldwide eradication program launched in 1967, some of the world’s wealthier countries were able to effectively end smallpox on their own. The USSR eradicated smallpox in 1936. The last known natural smallpox outbreak in the US was in 1949. By the time world-wide eradication efforts started, smallpox was receding but still endemic in over thirty countries.
Which meant that even if your country was smallpox free, if a few people missed their vaccines, it wasn’t guaranteed to stay that way.
In late December of 1959, celebrated artist of soviet propaganda posters Alexei Kokorekin arrived back from a trip to India feeling under the weather. At first, he just thought it was a cold, because why the fuck would he have gotten a deadly illness that hasn’t been an issue for over two decades? Sure, he’d just gone to that funeral where he’d touched the body of the guy with those pox marks all over his body, and yeah, he’d skipped his smallpox vaccine before leaving Russia, but, uh, why would it be smallpox?
Doctors diagnosed him with the flu and admitted him to the hospital, where he was free to cough on a lot of other sick people. Reportedly an intern suggested it could be smallpox upon hearing where he’d traveled from, but the idea was brushed off. Smallpox, here, now? Nonsense!
(Narrator: It was not, in fact, nonsense).
Kokorekin developed the tell-tale rash, to which doctors reacted “eh, allergies?” He died on December 29th. Within days, more people in the hospital ward started exhibiting symptoms.
By January fifteenth, they had gone into full “oh fuck’ mode, and got to work. This was no time for asking people politely to maybe wear a mask if they could. This was the time to treat smallpox with all the kindness of a particularly ornery honey badger. Everyone who’d had any contact with Alexei Kokorekin was found, quarantined, and vaccinated. If you had contact with any of those people, you were likewise quarantined and vaccinated. His daughter’s entire university class was evacuated and quarantined.
An old Soviet war slogan drummed throughout the country; “everything is for victory.”
There were over 3,000 vaccination sites run by 27,000 healthcare workers, 9.5 million vaccines were distributed, and over 9,000 people were quarantined. A total of forty-five people were diagnosed with smallpox, three cases of which resulted in fatalities.
This all happened in just nineteen days.
The epidemic was contained, and by February 3rd, the USSR had eradicated smallpox again. It took fast and decisive work, contact tracing, strict quarantine, and an entire region of people willing to work with medical professionals. What could have been a disaster was ended by a collaborative effort that was nothing less than heroic.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, hopeful that we can do big things, but we can’t do shit with people screaming about their freedoms when asked to put a stupid fucking piece of cloth in front of their stupid fucking faces.
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