Crystal Lee

May 2015

The global eradication of smallpox in 1979 is a huge public health achievement that depended on unprecedented collaboration between the former USSR, the US, and the World Health Organization (WHO). Smallpox is one of the most dangerous viruses of its kind: it killed 300-500 million people in the 20th century alone—more than three times the number killed in war—has a high fatality and transmission rate, and often leaves its hosts permanently scarred or blind. Since the last recorded death in the United Kingdom in 1978 which resulted from lab research contamination, WHO has required all member countries to submit existing strains of the live variola virus to high-security labs at the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia or the Vector Institute in Novosibirsk, Siberia to prevent future outbreak.

Despite the success of the global eradication effort, the threat from smallpox is far from over. Beginning in the 1970s, British and American intelligence agencies discovered a Soviet biological warfare program that attempted to weaponize smallpox, and there has since been no effort since to verify whether or not these former Soviet labs have actually given up their research samples, many of which could still be circulating on the black market or forgotten in the back of storage rooms. In fact, during the 1991 Gulf War, international investigators found evidence that Iraq had developed a covert biological arsenal that included smallpox that were ostensibly funneled from former Soviet labs. Stray samples of the variola virus even crop up in the United States: the FDA recently admitted in July 2014 that a storage lab at the National Institutes of Health was host to 327 vials of dangerous pathogens that had been unnoticed for decades. Especially given that civilian smallpox vaccinations ceased in the late 1970s, leaving a majority of the American population susceptible to smallpox infection, it is likely that actors hostile to the United States may attempt to gain access to these live samples as a means of terrorism. The ongoing threat of illicit or unaccounted vials of live smallpox virus thus requires action from OSTP in order to curb the potential for outbreak in the US and abroad.