Speaker 1: We heard a lot about coronaviruses over the past few years,
Speaker 1: really a lot, maybe too much, definitely more than we
Speaker 1: ever expected to hear, But we heard a lot less
Speaker 1: about other viruses. And viruses are amazing. Viruses are older
Speaker 1: than animals, they're older than plants. Some scientists think viruses
Speaker 1: may be the origin of all life on Earth. Viruses
Speaker 1: have been infecting humans, sometimes invisibly, sometimes with terrible consequences,
Speaker 1: for as long as there have been humans. The story
Speaker 1: of viruses is the story of humanity survival as a species,
Speaker 1: and we're going to tell some of those viral stories
Speaker 1: on this podcast. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is Incubation,
Speaker 1: a show about the other viruses. It's about science and
Speaker 1: about culture. It's about how viruses attack people and how
Speaker 1: people fight back. On each episode of Incubation, we're going
Speaker 1: to tell the story of one virus, and we're starting
Speaker 1: off with one of the deadliest viruses in history, smallpox.
Speaker 1: Smallpox stalked humanity for thousands of years. It gave people
Speaker 1: rashes and blisters all over their bodies, and often it
Speaker 1: killed them. Smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people, but
Speaker 1: we humans fought back in profound and brilliant ways. Our
Speaker 1: episode today starts with the story of Edward Jenner, a
Speaker 1: doctor in the British countryside, and it ends centuries later
Speaker 1: with thousands of people working together to wipe smallpox from
Speaker 1: the face of the earth. My first guest today is
Speaker 1: Gareth Williams. He's the author of Angel of Death, the
Speaker 1: Story of Smallpox, and Gareth he knows a lot about
Speaker 1: Edward Jenner.
Speaker 2: He was a great fields naturalist, and he also worked
Speaker 2: out something about the migration of birds, which was completely
Speaker 2: unknown before that. People thought that swallows went off and
Speaker 2: hid in mud under riverbanks and things like this.
Speaker 1: I read that he built a hydrogen balloon that flew
Speaker 1: twelve miles, That he played the violin, that he wrote poetry.
Speaker 2: He did all the above. He played the flute I
Speaker 2: think rather bet, and he played the fiddle. He sang.
Speaker 2: He had a good singing voice. I can recite one
Speaker 2: of his poems if you'd like it.
Speaker 1: Of course, give it to me, okay.
Speaker 2: That he wrote it when a man called doctor Weight
Speaker 2: died and doctor Weight had made medicinal gingerbread biscuits gingerbread nuts,
Speaker 2: which not only tasted good but actually killed intestinal worms,
Speaker 2: talking about tapeworms and things that around to twenty feet
Speaker 2: or more. So here's a put on the death of
Speaker 2: doctor Weight. It begins with the Latin names of the
Speaker 2: worms Ascarides, Tearies, Lumbricki, and all he Kyle sucking insects
Speaker 2: that tremblingly crawl. No more be afraid You're quite safe
Speaker 2: in our gun, for Dr Waite has finished making his
Speaker 2: gingerbread nuts.
Speaker 1: So in addition to writing poems about nuts, non trivially,
Speaker 1: Jenner also invented the first vaccine in human history. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about that. That's really what we're here to talk
Speaker 1: about today. He's born in seventeen forty nine. He's growing
Speaker 1: up in England in the you know, second half of
Speaker 1: the seventeen hundreds. What would his experience of smallpox have.
Speaker 2: Been in Jenner's day? If you got smallpox and you
Speaker 2: had roughly a one in three chants of getting it
Speaker 2: during your lifetime, then you had about a one in
Speaker 2: four chance of being killed by it. He went to
Speaker 2: boarding school when he was eight. Both his parents had
Speaker 2: died by then, and he had to be protected against
Speaker 2: smallpox which had broken out nearby.
Speaker 1: And this thing happens to him where somebody, if I
Speaker 1: understand right, cuts open his arm and puts dried out
Speaker 1: pus from a smallpox patient into the cut on Jenner's arm.
Speaker 1: What's going on there?
Speaker 2: This was what was called variolation. And variola is the
Speaker 2: Latin word for speckled or spotted. It's the old name
Speaker 2: for small pox, and it's the name of the virus
Speaker 2: that causes small pox, of Variola virus. And in brief,
Speaker 2: varilation was giving healthy people, usually children, the real thing
Speaker 2: in the hope that the artificial infection wouldn't kill them
Speaker 2: and that it would somehow leave them protected against future
Speaker 2: attacks of naturally acquired small pox. It was about a
Speaker 2: one in fifty mortality, so very very much lower. You
Speaker 2: got a little bit of small pox pus from one
Speaker 2: of those revolting blisters that covered people in the tens
Speaker 2: and thousands, and you would scratch a little bit of
Speaker 2: that revolting fluid into the skin on the arm of
Speaker 2: a healthy child.
Speaker 1: Does it work?
Speaker 2: It's mad, bad, crazy, dangerous, sounds completely counterintuitive. The amazing
Speaker 2: thing is it did work, very much so. And the
Speaker 2: other thing is that if you were variolated, even if
Speaker 2: you survived while you had your artificial dose of smallpox.
Speaker 2: You have the real thing. So even though you might
Speaker 2: get over it in two or three weeks, you could
Speaker 2: spread it to other non immune people, you know, people
Speaker 2: going back into the community, causing little mini outbreaks of
Speaker 2: smallpox and killing lots of other people bi collateral damage.
Speaker 1: Wow. So okay, So this is the world. Jenner is
Speaker 1: born into the world where you can either get smallpox
Speaker 1: and a good chance of dying from it if you
Speaker 1: get it, or if you're sort of lucky in a
Speaker 1: weird way, you can get variolated and have a non
Speaker 1: trivial chance of getting and dying of smallpox and maybe
Speaker 1: spreading it to other people. That was it. Those were
Speaker 1: the options.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: How does he go from being an eight year old
Speaker 1: boy getting very related to inventing the first vaccine in
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: Okay, if you want the conventional story, yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel like you're gonna give me two stories. One
Speaker 1: is it Jenner classic, So give me Jenner clas.
Speaker 2: The Jena classic is he is a medical apprentice in
Speaker 2: his early teens and he meets a milkmaid small pox
Speaker 2: has reappeared nearby, and she allegedly says to him, look, Gov,
Speaker 2: you don't need to worry about me having that, because
Speaker 2: I've had cowpox and that means that I can never
Speaker 2: ever catch smallpox. And this was complete news to January,
Speaker 2: never come across it. But it was also complete news
Speaker 2: to all his teachers. It simply wasn't part of conventional
Speaker 2: medical knowledge. It was common knowledge in the farming community.
Speaker 1: It was folk knowledge that had not sort of crossed
Speaker 1: over to kind of high brow medical knowledge.
Speaker 2: A lot of people didn't want to believe it because
Speaker 2: it had come up from the peasantry.
Speaker 1: Interesting, so you're saying, that's kind of the classic tale.
Speaker 1: Do you think it's true.
Speaker 2: I'd like to believe it's true. The alternative story is
Speaker 2: that one of Jenna's medical colleagues in Thornbury was actually
Speaker 2: a variolator, very successful one, and he noted, apparently independently,
Speaker 2: that some people that he valulated the varulation didn't take.
Speaker 2: In otherwords, there was no sign that they'd caught this
Speaker 2: artificial dose of smallpox. And this man is called John Fuster.
Speaker 2: And story B if you like, is that it was
Speaker 2: actually Feusta who made the original observation. Jenna was a
Speaker 2: close friend of his, and Jenna may have decided to
Speaker 2: pick up on it. Feusa didn't want to pursue it
Speaker 2: because he was making so much money as a valulator.
Speaker 2: He didn't see the need for any particular improvement.
Speaker 1: Okay, so Jenner has this idea, whether it's from the
Speaker 1: milkmaid or from his colleague, this idea that cow pox,
Speaker 1: which we should say is not a deadly disease in humans, right,
Speaker 1: can protect humans against a smallpox. What does he do
Speaker 1: with this idea.
Speaker 2: Well, he doesn't do anything with it for over thirty years.
Speaker 2: He goes off he finishes his medical studies in London.
Speaker 2: In seventeen ninety six, he gets the idea of collecting
Speaker 2: cases of people who've had cowpox and look to see
Speaker 2: if they appeared to be protected against smallpox. And he
Speaker 2: collects a number of cases and the story appears to
Speaker 2: be true. And then he moves beyond that to actually
Speaker 2: test the hypothesis that giving somebody an artificial dose of
Speaker 2: cowpox will protect them against smallpox. The killer and his
Speaker 2: first guinea pig is his gardener's son, James Phipps. And
Speaker 2: the ethics might be regarded as a bit dodgy, because
Speaker 2: back then, if you were the gardener's son, then you
Speaker 2: were effectively the property of the Lord of the manor
Speaker 2: III Jenna, and he introduced cowpox into the arm of
Speaker 2: James Phipps, who was eight years old. And what Jenna
Speaker 2: did was to find a case of cowpox with a
Speaker 2: lovely juicy cowpox blister on the back of her hand.
Speaker 2: He stuck a lancid in that collected the juice and
Speaker 2: scratched the cowpox juice into the arm of James Phipps,
Speaker 2: and that all went well. The lad got a bit
Speaker 2: of a local reaction, he got a bit of a fever.
Speaker 2: Two weeks later he was back to normal. So Jenna
Speaker 2: now has to test his hypothesis to see if the
Speaker 2: lad is protected against smallpox. The killer gave him a
Speaker 2: small dose of smallpox and it didn't take So that,
Speaker 2: if you like, was the Eureka moment.
Speaker 1: So he just invented the first vaccine in the history
Speaker 1: of the world, a vaccine against maybe the most deadly
Speaker 1: infectious disease. Truly one of the great discoveries in the
Speaker 1: history of medicine and the history of public health. What's
Speaker 1: the first thing he does to try and tell the world.
Speaker 2: Well, he writes it all up as a paper and
Speaker 2: he sends it off to the Royal Society, and amazingly,
Speaker 2: the Royal Society reject the paper.
Speaker 1: They reject his paper, They reject the guy just invented vaccines.
Speaker 2: Well, they probably wouldn't have appreciated the full significance. But
Speaker 2: you're right. It is one of the great pinnacle publications
Speaker 2: in the history of medicine and science.
Speaker 1: But he doesn't give up. What's he doing next?
Speaker 2: He writes it up as a pamphlet. It's always known
Speaker 2: as The Inquiry, okay, and it was published by private
Speaker 2: printer in Soho came out in September seventeen ninety eight.
Speaker 2: Jenna did not attempt to hide or make secret his invention.
Speaker 2: He wanted everybody to know. He wanted everybody to do
Speaker 2: it because he wanted to conquer smallpox.
Speaker 1: But you're saying he could also have not published it
Speaker 1: and just tried to sell vaccination himself and be the
Speaker 1: sort of soul purveyor of it.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. His aim was to spread the word
Speaker 2: as widely and as quickly as possible. It really takes
Speaker 2: off and people recognize the value of vaccination immediately, and
Speaker 2: within a few months it's on the continent of Europe,
Speaker 2: it's widespread across England. It's making its appearance in North America.
Speaker 1: You said within months, within months, months, within This is
Speaker 1: an era when there's obviously no electronic communication. They're going
Speaker 1: to have to put the inquiry on a ship and
Speaker 1: sail it across the ocean. But you're saying it spreads
Speaker 1: basically a media in.
Speaker 2: That absolute absolutely.
Speaker 1: What do we know about how many people are being vaccinated?
Speaker 1: How widespread it is, Like, tell me more about that.
Speaker 2: Well, it's still the preserve of the rich and wealthy
Speaker 2: who could afford to pay for medical services, so it's
Speaker 2: not widespread and philanthropic, but in terms of geographical reach
Speaker 2: it is very impressive. Reaches Switzerland very quickly. The inquiry
Speaker 2: reaches the King of Spain and he arranges for the
Speaker 2: divine gift of vaccination to be sent out to all
Speaker 2: the Spanish colonies and the Caribbean, South America around the
Speaker 2: back of the world.
Speaker 1: So this is all happening in his lifetime, right, He's
Speaker 1: seeing this happen.
Speaker 2: Well, Jenna works very hard actually trying to spread the word.
Speaker 2: He is always one of the great saints of medicine.
Speaker 2: But he wasn't a perfect man. In any sense. And
Speaker 2: one of the things that he got wrong quite early
Speaker 2: was to be able to connon himself into thinking the
Speaker 2: vaccination was absolutely per effect, whereas in fact it did
Speaker 2: have side effects. For example, you could get a farmyard
Speaker 2: infection from kyle pox having get scratched into your arm.
Speaker 2: And the other thing was that it needed to be topped.
Speaker 1: Up, meaning like a booster, you needed what.
Speaker 2: Absolutely so other countries were giving boosters in the early
Speaker 2: teenage years. And again if smallpox broke out again, say
Speaker 2: in Germany, then people nearby would be revaccinated again. So
Speaker 2: that was one of the things that he got tragically wrong.
Speaker 1: What's the end of his story.
Speaker 2: He gets gifts and accolades from all over the world.
Speaker 2: He gets diamond ring from the Empress of Russia. He
Speaker 2: spent his declining years, if you like, after his wife died,
Speaker 2: being the vaccine clerk to the world. That's the way
Speaker 2: he described himself. He was sitting in his office writing
Speaker 2: letters back to all the fan mail that poured in
Speaker 2: from across the world. He was able to look around
Speaker 2: the world and see a world that was already changed.
Speaker 1: By the way, how does it come up with the
Speaker 1: name vaccine?
Speaker 2: Well, the name was actually coined by somebody else. It's
Speaker 2: from the Latin vaca, meaning cow, and Louis pasteur. When
Speaker 2: he invented his rabies vaccine and various other vaccines, he
Speaker 2: suggested that all such immanising or protective preparations should be
Speaker 2: called vaccines in honor of Jenna. So that's why we
Speaker 2: call them all vaccines today.
Speaker 1: Thank you for your time. Was a delight to talk
Speaker 1: with you.
Speaker 2: Pleasure. Thank you for yours.
Speaker 1: Edward Jenner died in eighteen twenty three. In the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: his vaccine would serve as the inspiration for one of
Speaker 1: the most ambitious public health projects in the history of
Speaker 1: the world, to wipe out every single case of smallpox forever.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. In the first half of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, Edward Jenner's vaccine continued to spread, but huge
Speaker 1: swaths of the population remained unvaccinated, and hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of people continued to die of smallpox. The world had
Speaker 1: become smaller and more connected. Air travel was taking off,
Speaker 1: and smallpox was happy to hitch a ride. Even countries
Speaker 1: that thought they'd eliminated smallpox found out that they could
Speaker 1: only keep it at Bay for so long. A smallpox
Speaker 1: scare grips Great Britain. In the wake of five deaths
Speaker 1: attributed to the disease that was all but wiped out
Speaker 1: in Western nations, tens of thousands throughout the nation line
Speaker 1: up at health centers to be inoculated.
Speaker 2: The outbreak of a bad.
Speaker 3: Disease is checked by modern medical science.
Speaker 1: In the middle of the twentieth century, leaders around the
Speaker 1: world cooked up an audacious plan to drive the smallpox
Speaker 1: virus to extinction, to eradicate it from the face of
Speaker 1: the earth. Donald Hopkins directed the smallpox eradication campaign in
Speaker 1: Sierra Leone in the late nineteen sixties, just as the
Speaker 1: global eradication project was getting started. When he arrived in
Speaker 1: Sierra Leone, the West African nation had the highest smallpox
Speaker 1: rate in the world. You get to this country, what
Speaker 1: do you see on the ground?
Speaker 4: Well, I see, first of all a beautiful country, and
Speaker 4: then I'm introduced to the health workers that I'm going
Speaker 4: to be working with and find that they are very capable,
Speaker 4: very enthusiastic. I'm young and very optimistic as well. Yes,
Speaker 4: people were dying, but the upshot of that was that
Speaker 4: people were eager. Most people were eager to get vaccinated,
Speaker 4: and so we did not have a problem of trying
Speaker 4: to persuade people to cooperate with the program, and that
Speaker 4: made things a lot easier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, easier, but this is still a country where there
Speaker 1: are a lot of places that are just hard to
Speaker 1: get to, right. I mean, are there any particular instances
Speaker 1: you remember that were that were especially challenging.
Speaker 4: So in the summer of nineteen sixty eight, it's the
Speaker 4: rainy season in sily On, we get a message that
Speaker 4: there's an outbreak in this area southeast of the capital
Speaker 4: area called Moyamba. So I went there with a driver
Speaker 4: and a couple of the Sierra Leone and public health workers.
Speaker 4: And the village where that we were summoned to visit,
Speaker 4: in fact, was about a forty five minute trek from
Speaker 4: the nearest road. I'm afraid of snakes, and this was
Speaker 4: a This was a trek through the forest.
Speaker 1: You're like Indiana Jones, You're wearing a hot.
Speaker 4: No hat I had. I had a full head of
Speaker 4: hair then, so I didn't I didn't have to wear
Speaker 4: a hat. But to we get into this get into
Speaker 4: this village, and there are lots of people with smallpox,
Speaker 4: including most notably a newborn infant only a few days old,
Speaker 4: that was lying on a mat between its mother and
Speaker 4: the mother's co wife.
Speaker 1: When you say co wife, what does that mean?
Speaker 4: That means that they were both married to the same man. Okay,
Speaker 4: and the child had not been vaccinated. But both of
Speaker 4: these two women were in the full throes of smallpox infections,
Speaker 4: and so that infant had been exposed. Fortunately, I had
Speaker 4: vaccine with me. I was able to vaccinate the infant,
Speaker 4: and later about ten days later, when I came back,
Speaker 4: I saw that the vaccination was taken and that baby
Speaker 4: was saved.
Speaker 1: And just to just because you know, I've never seen smallpox, thankfully.
Speaker 1: When you say that two women were in the throes
Speaker 1: of infection, what did they look like?
Speaker 4: Well, it's hard to see people suffering so much, because
Speaker 4: it's not only that people their bodies are swollen. They're
Speaker 4: covered in all of these pustules. But it's very painful.
Speaker 4: People describe it as feeling as if your skin was
Speaker 4: on fire. Smallpox caused a generalized rash over most of
Speaker 4: the body. It was most intense over the face, the hands,
Speaker 4: and the feet. But in this instance you could see
Speaker 4: these raised pimples first you get little bumps that turn
Speaker 4: into blisters that then fill with puffs, which then these
Speaker 4: blisters break, and if you're lucky and survive the broken
Speaker 4: blisters and puffs, that all dries up, and gradually, over
Speaker 4: the course of two three weeks the scabs drop off.
Speaker 4: But all of that is infectious, and people when they're
Speaker 4: just even before the rash starts, when they start feeling
Speaker 4: headache fever, they're already breathing out smallpox virus onto other people.
Speaker 4: And so the challenge is the situation like that, to
Speaker 4: vaccinate as many people who do not yet have smallpox
Speaker 4: as quickly as you can.
Speaker 1: So, okay, So you get to this village. You see
Speaker 1: these two women and the baby. The women are clearly sick.
Speaker 1: You vaccinate the baby because the smallpox vaccine can actually
Speaker 1: help people who are in the early stages of an infection.
Speaker 1: What do you do next? What else is happening in
Speaker 1: this village?
Speaker 4: In this sensance, we learned very quickly that two weeks before,
Speaker 4: a very prominent man in that village who was head
Speaker 4: of a secret society, had gotten smallpox and had died.
Speaker 4: Because he was so prominent, people came from other villages
Speaker 4: to visit him when he was ill, and people came
Speaker 4: for his funeral.
Speaker 1: This is a giant alarm bell. It's very bad news
Speaker 1: for you. In nineteen sixty.
Speaker 4: Eight, very very bad news, because we also began learning
Speaker 4: when I was there. What we were seeing was that
Speaker 4: many people had come from other villages as well surrounding
Speaker 4: this village, and so this was a much bigger outbreak
Speaker 4: than what we were expecting.
Speaker 1: So tell me about what containment meant at this time
Speaker 1: in this context.
Speaker 4: Yes, when we first began working in the smallpox program,
Speaker 4: the strategy was to mass vaccinate eighty percent or more
Speaker 4: of the population. The containment surveillance strategy was developed where
Speaker 4: the strategy became find out where the current cases of
Speaker 4: smallpox are go there, give priority to vaccinating people in
Speaker 4: those households and that village and nearby villages, so called
Speaker 4: ring vaccination, because if you could do that, you could
Speaker 4: stop the virus from spreading to other people. That was
Speaker 4: a much more efficient way of getting after the virus
Speaker 4: to stop transmission. Because now you're looking to vaccinate three
Speaker 4: four five percent of the population rather than eighty percent
Speaker 4: of the population.
Speaker 1: It's like you draw a circle, a big circle around
Speaker 1: the village where the infection is and you vaccinate everybody
Speaker 1: inside that circle. So it's like you're surrounding the virus
Speaker 1: with immune people.
Speaker 4: That's exactly what you're doing. And the radius of that
Speaker 4: circle was at least five miles.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you have your information right, you have your
Speaker 1: epidemiological surveillance, you have your your ring on a map.
Speaker 1: What do you do?
Speaker 4: We then come back with several other vaccinators and have
Speaker 4: a plan to assign different groups to go to each
Speaker 4: of these villages and make sure that everyone there is vaccinated.
Speaker 1: And you just show up in a village where if
Speaker 1: your briefcase full of a vaccine and say here we are,
Speaker 1: come line up.
Speaker 4: The villagers had had warning, and in fact, we discussed
Speaker 4: with the village chief and the senior people in the
Speaker 4: village to agree on a mutual time when was most
Speaker 4: convenient for them for us to come back and make
Speaker 4: sure everybody was vaccinated. It had to give them notice
Speaker 4: in advance, because otherwise, if you just show up, people
Speaker 4: are out on their farms, which could be two or
Speaker 4: three miles away in many different directions, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So how long does it take you to with your
Speaker 1: team go to all of the villages inside this ring
Speaker 1: and vaccinate everybody.
Speaker 4: That took a matter of a few days fast, so
Speaker 4: each team only had to go to one or two villages,
Speaker 4: and so we were able to get there in a
Speaker 4: few days and get them vaccinated, and we were able
Speaker 4: to stop that particular outbreak in only three or four
Speaker 4: weeks max. Wow.
Speaker 1: So it worked.
Speaker 4: It worked. Not only worked in Sierra Leone, but when
Speaker 4: we sent a telegram back to CDC headquarters to let
Speaker 4: them know what had happened, they were ecstatic. And of
Speaker 4: course this was one of the first big demonstrations of
Speaker 4: the power of this new ring vaccination strategy, and so
Speaker 4: it electrified the entire global smallpox eradication program to see
Speaker 4: that this worked so well in Sierra Leone, which had
Speaker 4: so much smallpox.
Speaker 1: So we have the good news. What did you do next?
Speaker 1: How long were you in Siri Leone? What happened next?
Speaker 4: Ord? I was in Siri Leone for a total of
Speaker 4: two years.
Speaker 2: That was.
Speaker 4: I left sierri Leone in August of nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 4: Smallpox was gone from Sierra Leone by April May of
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: So by the time you left, you and your team
Speaker 1: had eradicated smallpox from one of the worst affected countries
Speaker 1: in the world.
Speaker 4: And that was a big exclamation point. I was then
Speaker 4: forever optimistic that smallpox was gonna go. It was then
Speaker 4: to me just a matter of time.
Speaker 1: It's really striking to me that we or you, you
Speaker 1: and your colleagues eradicated smallpox more than forty years ago now,
Speaker 1: and we humanity haven't succeeded in eradicating anything else yet.
Speaker 1: I know we're getting close on polio, but we've been
Speaker 1: close on polio for a while, and yes, it's not
Speaker 1: gone yet. Was smallpox unanomaly?
Speaker 4: Yes, smallpox is anominally Unfortunately, nothing else is like smallpox.
Speaker 4: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're
Speaker 4: targeting everywhere wherever it exists. And it's going to exist
Speaker 4: in some places where it's a big problem, people care
Speaker 4: about it, they are motivated to work against it. But
Speaker 4: it's also going to exist in some areas where it's
Speaker 4: a trivial problem, where people have much bigger things to
Speaker 4: worry about than that targeted disease. But you're going to
Speaker 4: have to get them on board as well, because as
Speaker 4: long as it exists, anywhere. It's unsafe for people everywhere.
Speaker 1: Doctor, it was a real delight to talk to you.
Speaker 1: Let me say thank you for your work. I'm very
Speaker 1: grateful to live in a world with no smallpox.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you, I am too.
Speaker 1: Donald Hopkins is currently the Special Advisor for guinea worm
Speaker 1: Eradication at the Carter Center. Thanks to my guest today
Speaker 1: Gareth Williams and Donald Hopkins. Next week we'll tell the
Speaker 1: story of the race for the polio vaccine, and we'll
Speaker 1: try to figure out why polio and other viruses have
Speaker 1: turned out to be so much harder to eradicate than smallpox.
Speaker 3: We need to ensure that we have we have a
Speaker 3: full momentum for this last push, the final push to
Speaker 3: reach that last child in that last village of these areas.
Speaker 1: Incubation is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby
Speaker 1: Studio at iHeartMedia. It's produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang, Ariela Markowitz,
Speaker 1: and Amy Gaines McQuaid. Our editors are Julia Barton and
Speaker 1: Karen Schakerjie Mastering by Anne Pope, fact checking by Joseph Fridman.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Katherine Gerardeau and Matt Romano. I'm
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein. Thanks for listening.