Daily MOS: The Eradication of Smallpox, Part I

I just spent two days convalescing after my second dose of the covid vaccine, and I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed with my 5G reception. 

Being vaccinated and ostensibly immune stirred a lot of questions for me. Will we need boosters? Will it get worse? Nobody knows. But it got me thinking of the one and only time humanity went on a campaign to vaccinate the planet with the goal of ending a monster, and succeeded. 

Part one of a two-part Moment of Science… The eradication of smallpox.

Smallpox was typically fatal for three out of ten of people unlucky enough to encounter it, and the other seven out of ten wouldn’t fucking recommend it. About two weeks after exposure, common symptoms included a few days of high fever, body aches, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, and a headache. It could be forgivably mistaken for a nasty flu. Generally by day four, the telltale rash appeared. I’m gonna spare you an intensely detailed description from here, but the pox would sprout to an alarming, permanently disfiguring degree. It took about a month for the disease to run its highly infectious course.

Oh, and the virus had the good graces to be airborne. The dark ages sound like a great time to live to the ripe old age of infancy. 

The first known evidence of an outbreak dates back to 3000 years ago, found in Egyptian mummies. Written accounts of a disease that was likely smallpox started showing up about 1600 years ago in China. I can’t find a record of what was written, but I’m guessing it was something like “death-filled dermal volcanoes of fuck everything.”

Long before Edward Jenner’s alleged revelation with the milkmaids was the “prevent smallpox by snorting diseased flesh like cocaine” racket. 

Primitive forms of inoculation called variolation developed across several cultures, possibly independent of one another. Smallpox pus was scratched into the skin, or a bit of dried smallpox scab was inhaled. It wasn’t without risks, people often developed mild smallpox symptoms, but it drastically reduced risk of fatality from smallpox. 

Documented use of variolation has been found as early as the 1500s in China, but it’s suspected to have been used much earlier. In the early 1700s when smallpox spread through Boston, an enslaved man named Oneismus attempted to tell his owner about variolation. A bunch of racist Bostonians were like “the slave said to do it? We’d literally rather goddamn die.” Just over half of the 11,000 residents caught smallpox in the outbreak, and of those, 844 people died. One in seven. Out of an estimated 250 people who received inoculation, about two percent died. One in forty.

It wasn’t perfect, but variolation programs saved a lot of people before vaccines.

Cowpox benefited from a rare degree of fatality. As an English doctor in the late 1700s, Edward Jenner wasn’t the first to notice that milkmaids who developed cowpox never fell ill with smallpox. He wasn’t even the first person to try using cowpox for an inoculation (yeah, that was fucking news to me too). In fact, five physicians did before him. His superhero origin story caught on with the help of his own personal propagandist, a physician named John Baron who concocted the milkmaid fable. 

This was right before the turn of the nineteenth century. Smallpox still had plenty of time to fuck up absolutely everything.

Skip ahead about 150 years, and we’ve standardized vaccines a touch. Smallpox is under control in some parts of the world. There’s still a long way to go though, and other eradication efforts have failed. Who do you think stands up at the meeting and says “hey guys, uh, group project?”

A Soviet virologist named Viktor Mikhailovich Zhdanov, with an ambitious suggestion.

This has been part one of this two part Moment of Science, reminding you that there are over three billion more people alive now than there were last time we eradicated a disease.

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