A Horrible Disease and a Humble Hero – the Power of Passion

In May of 1958, the world was just on the brink of a new era of eradication of infectious disease. It would be an era unprecedented in human history and no one quite believed in it yet.

Except for a man named Viktor Zhdanov, a virologist from Ukraine. Viktor Zhdanov attended a mundane meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota that month. The meeting was called the Eleventh World Health Assembly. As the name suggests, the meeting involved health muckety-mucks from around the world. Mr. Zhdanov was attending as a muckety-muck from the Soviet Union.

At the meeting in Minneapolis, Mr. Zhdanov made his pitch for the new era of eradication. Mr. Zhdanov’s fellow muckety-mucks in the Soviet Union were not as impressed with the prospects for a new era as Mr. Zhdanov was, which was perhaps fortunate. Because the general lack of conviction led to Zhdanov being able to make his pitch.

And the pitch was so outlandish (eradicate smallpox in 10 years) that the WHO mounted no real opposition to Zhdanov’s well-researched plan. When something seems unlikely, it poses little threat. Someone somewhere probably benefited from the existence of smallpox but since it didn’t seem realistic that it could actually be eradicated, the pro-smallpox lobby never really got off the ground.

What made Zhdanov’s pitch seem unlikely was that human beings had never eradicated any infectious disease from the planet on purpose before – ever. And now Zhdanov was proposing that all humanity had to do was make wise use of something that it had figured out and deployed during the era of the American revolutionary war – a smallpox vaccine.

A vaccine – beloved by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, arguably instrumental in ensuring that the United States of America ever came to be in the first place – but still just a humble vaccine.

All human beings had to do to eradicate a disease that killed about as many people as live in the US today (300 million give or take) was utilize some logistical common sense and a vaccine.

So people did that, executed something simple, and eradicated smallpox in 1977. Human beings proved that it is possible to completely eliminate a monstrous killer by simply deploying common sense and not arguing about it. That’s it. That’s all it took.

Except for Zhdanov. It took him too. He had to convince people to enact those simple steps. To do that he spoke to people with passion. And experience. And common sense. And quotes from Thomas Jefferson. And conviction. And forcefulness. And humility.

And good timing.

In the 1950s a polio epidemic raged through the U.S., and a mass vaccination program had reduced the number of polio cases from the tens of thousands to fifty-six hundred. Polio was a terrifying disease and popular gratitude toward the vaccine was passionate.

The world was also in the golden age of antibiotics. Infectious disease, humanity’s number 1 predator, was on the ropes. Humans were punching back against disease. Even malaria was taking it on the chin, thanks to pesticides such as DDT, that whacked mosquitos and other disease-carrying insects.

Progress Against Disease

Indeed, the world was in such a frenzy of progress against disease that, in wealthy countries, an entire generation (or several) has no idea what infectious disease really means any more. The reaction to the pandemic shown by many (including supposedly educated people) reflected a profound ignorance of the history of humanity and disease. Individuals are more scared of a needle and a vaccine than of measles, polio, smallpox, COVID, tetanus, diphtheria, or anything else. That’s because they’ve never seen a child die of measles or get put in an iron lung with polio and they have no emotional understanding of (and there no belief in) the toll disease takes or the miracles of vaccines and antibiotics. Many people have a natural skepticism of these things proportional to their ignorance of history and lack of understanding of anything related to infectious disease.

But when Zhdanov got up to speak to an international audience, there was no such ignorance. Zhdanov’s passion met the moment. The world was ready for passion and optimism about eradicating a disease.

Sometimes passionate people make a difference. A worldwide difference. Even without the money, the hubris, and the dubious motives of people like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Elon Musk.

Sometimes a passionate person can find an area of low resistance, research the hell out of it, know what they’re talking about, and slide a world-changing proposition right through without anyone noticing.

It happens more often than you’d think. Precisely because you never notice it. Most of the things that you frequently interact with you have no idea where they came from or why they exist.

The shower – do you know the name and history of Mr. or Ms. Shower who took on the bathtub and improved bathing for everyone? The Snickers bar. Do you know who created the Snickers bar? Xanax. Why does Xanax exist? Public schools – they exist worldwide – when did that start and why? Toilet paper – who was behind that idea? Bleach – when did that come into widespread use? And so on.

It seems like the great inventors were great. Because they ran around making a big deal of themselves, a la Musk or Ford or Edison. But most of the really great innovators of the world were not so much great in the chest-beating sense as passionate about something that could be slipped into a world that was almost (not quite) ready for them. They thought something could be done and they wanted it to happen.

Viktor Zhdanov was pretty fed up with small pox. What are you pretty fed up with?