Embed Notice

In 1958 the position of the World Health Organization on promoting smallpox vaccination was simply to urge health administrations to conduct their own campaigns against the virus, as part of their regular public health programmes.

Where the other ministers in the WHO saw doubt and despair
– pointing to failed campaigns to eliminate hookworm disease and yellow fever
– a scientist named Viktor Mikhaĭlovich Zhdanov saw opportunity.
Although Zhdanov’s name is little known today, he was an influential scientist at the time. With a background in virology and epidemiology, and a position as the deputy health minister of the Soviet Union, he had already led a successful campaign which contained smallpox in the Soviet Union and another campaign which contained Guinea-worm disease in the Central Asian republics.

In 1958, Zhdanov argued at length that the WHO should lead worldwide campaigns to quarantine, isolate and vaccinate people around the world until the disease was finally eliminated. He argued that the variola virus would be easier to contain than other pathogens because humans were its only host. It mattered because the disease remained endemic in many developing regions, which lacked the resources and political ability to vaccinate their populations, and it threatened other regions that were susceptible to reintroductions of the virus.
Zhdanov also brought his technical expertise to the table – he argued that a new procedure (lyophilisation) could be used to preserve stocks of the smallpox vaccine, allowing them to be transported easily to where they were needed.
His argument was so convincing that the World Health assembly voted unanimously in favour of the global campaign, when a similar proposal had been rejected for being too unrealistic just three years previously.
The process was neither simple nor usual, but it was possible. After struggling for years to find the financial support and the political resources to eliminate the disease in poor and dense countries such as India, smallpox was declared eradicated across the entire world two decades later, in 1980.
Zhdanov is not the only figure who deserves credit for this effort, of course, as countless other scientists, ministers, healthcare workers and ordinary people were involved in the gargantuan effort to eliminate smallpox once and for all.
But in many ways, his vision and undertakings on the campaign represent the ideals of Works in Progress: to see possibility where others see despair, to persuade with reason and evidence, and to push the boundaries of global welfare with human ingenuity.
The ideas we aspire to spread may not be as successful as the smallpox eradication programme was, and the stories of how progress came to be may not be so complete, but they will positively be, in more ways than one, works in progress

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-viktor-zhdanov/