We Thought We’d Beat These Three Diseases. Now’s The Time to Finally Stop Them

By Richard Conniff/The New York Times

There was a time not so long ago when preventing epidemic disease was a cause ordinary people embraced and celebrated. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Americans to join the fight against polio, for instance, he reported that envelopes containing “dimes and quarters and even dollar bills” arrived by the truckload at the White House, “from children who want to help other children to get well.” The March of Dimes went on to fund the development of polio vaccines. When one of them, the Salk vaccine, proved effective, in April 1955, church bells rang out nationwide.

Likewise, in the mid-1960s, when the World Health Organization announced its wildly ambitious plan to eradicate smallpox in just 10 years, people rose to the challenge. Small teams bearing vaccines and a simple lancet called the bifurcated needle were soon moving through the afflicted parts of the planet — by camel across the desert in Sudan, by elephant to ford rivers in India, and by all the more familiar modes of travel. People everywhere lined up to get the peculiar dimpled mark of smallpox vaccination, freeing them from the scourge that had been maiming and killing their families for as long as they could remember.

As many as 150,000 men and women at a time worked on the campaign, and with a final naturally occurring case discovered in Somalia in October 1977, they eradicated smallpox in the wild. For veterans of the “order of the bifurcated needle,” as they called themselves, it was the proudest hour of their lives.

It may seem unlikely that we could ever recapture that determination and excitement about standing up together against a deadly disease. Instead of presenting a unified front against Covid-19, we fought bitterly, and three years on, our shared response seems to be a shell-shocked unwillingness to even think about epidemic diseases.