Bob H. Reinhardt. The End of a Global Pox

The End of a Global Pox: America and the Eradication of Smallpox in the Cold War Era begins, unexpectedly, with a 2001 role-playing game that brought together key participants from the fields of politics, medicine, and the military to consider the alleged reemergence of smallpox in Oklahoma. The exercise, known as Operation Dark Winter, “revealed a tragic irony: that the global eradication program itself had created a world in which smallpox seemed to represent a dire threat” (5). This opening sets the tone for Bob H. Reinhardt’s book, which complicates the popular narrative of smallpox by not ending with eradication, but, instead, bringing the story to a present where the meaning of that achievement becomes a great deal less certain than previously imagined. Reinhardt is interested in complicating more than that, insisting that understanding smallpox eradication also requires a fresh look at the campaign itself. His subsequent argument leans heavily on Erez Manela’s recent work on the topic. The central question is why smallpox and why that moment? Adopting a narrative that Manela laid out in a 2010 article in Diplomatic History entitled “A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History,” Reinhardt argues that the answer lies with Lyndon B. Johnson, who committed the U.S. to smallpox eradication as “a step toward a Global Great Society: a liberal effort to engage the decolonizing Cold War world by manipulating the nonhuman world, including diseases” (53). He postulates that Johnson’s shift to health issues stemmed from an “eye-opening” 1961 visit to Asia (67), which turned him on to the idea that the U.S. should be fighting disease abroad. Johnson’s specific emphasis on smallpox eradication came later, driven, apparently, by a mix of factors that included the persistent call for such a program by representatives from developing countries in the World Health Assembly (WHA), recent advances in vaccine and vaccination technology, and the conviction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that it was an achievable goal. In response, Johnson announced in 1965 that the U.S. was “ready to work with other interested countries to see to it that smallpox is a thing of the past by 1975” (52).

Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Smallpox · Vaccination · World War II · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine · Virology