Essay

“One of the most important committees on which I served was the Smallpox Eradication Committee of the World Health Organization, to which I was appointed on the basis of the success of my vaccinia virus research program.

“...In the late '80s, [WHO] renewed efforts to destroy [all remaining smallpox] stocks. This did not seem smart to me for several reasons...Therefore, at the Ninth International Congress of Virology in Glasgow in 1993, I pointed out, in the course of opening a roundtable conference entitled ‘Smallpox: The final steps toward eradication,’ how shortsighted and self-destructive destruction of the officially sanctioned stocks of smallpox virus would be. I followed up this talk with three articles...[which] elicited a great deal of interest and a deluge of comments. The official United States position vacillated for several years until in the late '90s, U.S. officials decided (after urging by Britain) not to destroy smallpox virus stocks. The wisdom of this decision became apparent during the smallpox virus scare several years ago when the potency of smallpox virus vaccine stocks could be determined accurately.”

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