Just like today, the US dragged its hoof. But then came a moment of unprecedented world-wide collaboration

Since the eruption of Covid-1 9 experts and commentators have often mentioned the Spanishflu of 1918 as a useful precedent. But with various drug firms moving toward the advanced places of vaccine testing, we should now shift our attention to the history of smallpox. Though smallpox is a different, and more deadly, pathogen than the coronavirus, the international politics that gripped the campaign for its global abolition during the 20 th century offer valuable tasks for the coming struggle we will face distributing a coronavirus vaccine.

In 1958, the World Health Organization initiated a program to rid the world of smallpox. The virus has all along been embossed out in rich countries, but it still scourged populations in Brazil, South Asia, Africa and Indonesia. At a World Health Assembly meeting that time, Dr Viktor Zhdanov, the deputy minister for health in the Soviet Union, urged delegates to consider the cost-to-benefit fraction of a world safarus to eliminate smallpox. Not exclusively would working together to eradicate the virus help to keep all nations safe, it would also eliminate the costs of their annual vaccination programmes.

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Read more: theguardian.com