As of March 2021, Covid-19 has killed more than 2.5 million people. It’s brought on a dramatic economic downfall, a mental health crisis, and has generally just put the world on pause. But we don’t have to look far back in history to see how much worse it could have been.
Smallpox was twice as contagious as Covid-19, and over 60 times as deadly. It plagued humanity for centuries, left many survivors blinded and covered in scars, and killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone. But today, smallpox has been eradicated. Through a massive global effort, we were able to wipe the disease completely out of existence.
So can we do the same thing with Covid-19? And if we can’t, what are our other options?
Read the article this video is based on, by Kelsey Piper: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21…
On Smallpox:
https://www.amazon.com/House-Fire-Era…
https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/…
Edward Jenner’s story and more on the first vaccine:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…
https://www.who.int/news-room/feature…
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/sp…
On the Balmis Expedition, which brought the smallpox vaccine around the world:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/a…
The fascinating story of the last smallpox outbreak in the United States:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/ny…
msamba 
The chapter of smallpox does not seem to be closed yet either. There are obviously ape and cow variants that have sprung over to human beings (they are also carried by cats and rats), and scientists are afraid that these viruses might mutate into a more “human friendly” form, which then would facilitate a spread from human to human.
We also still have the mutations of the Spanish flue and the other following pandemic viruses around (5 or 6 of them), which cause for example between 1500 and 2000 deaths in Denmark each year in spite of vaccinations.
I just watched a documentary about the Spanish flue, which killed about 100 million people globally (at that time that was a large part of the population). The observation over the years (about three years of pandemic) was that the virus mutated into a less deadly form, because it would be bad for the virus to kill the “host” off completely. This seems to be the case with the COVID-19 virus as well, as far as I can see it. The mutations are more infectious, but less deadly.
As they say in the video, the complete eradication could only be accomplished because it was a human only virus, which is very rare. Also the Spanish flue seems to have been passed on to humans by birds. The idea with the buffer vaccination is brilliant, but it only works, if the vaccine works 100%, which we have not been able to achieve with any influenza, sars, corona virus yet. As per WHO, the annual influenza vaccine has an protection effect of about 45%, which does not sound impressive to me.
Living healthy and boosting the immune system might be a good idea.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Absolutely!
LikeLiked by 1 person