The official end of smallpox

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The official end of smallpox

Published: 09 Dec. 2025, 00:05 Updated: 09 Dec. 2025, 14:31

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Roh Jeong-tae

The author is a writer and senior fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research.

On Dec. 9, 1979, scientists at the World Health Organization confirmed that smallpox had been eradicated. Five months later, the World Health Assembly declared the world free of the disease. One of the deadliest infections in human history had been eliminated through a coordinated global effort.

Smallpox is also one of the oldest documented diseases. Records indicate an outbreak in China in 1122 BCE, and ancient Sanskrit texts in India describe a virus consistent with it. Traces of smallpox have even been detected on the mummified remains of Pharaoh Ramses V, who died in 1156 BCE.

Imagined depiction of Edward Jenner administering the first smallpox vaccination. [WIKIPEDIA]

Yet the invention of vaccination did not produce an immediate eradication. As late as 1967, smallpox still killed 2 million people worldwide. Administering vaccines to every population across different continents, political systems and health infrastructures proved far more challenging than the scientific breakthrough itself. Nearly two centuries after Edward Jenner’s discovery, the disease was declared extinct in nature only in 1979.

No country administers routine smallpox vaccination today. Generations once taught to fear tiger attacks, the dreaded smallpox and even war as the three great dangers of childhood now regard smallpox as a distant historical threat. So remote has smallpox become that misinformation about vaccines, including conspiratorial claims about their safety, circulates among groups with little awareness of the eradication effort that made modern public health possible.

Smallpox was the first infectious disease eradicated by humans. Its disappearance marks an extraordinary scientific and logistical achievement, one that required sustained international cooperation and trust in medical science. As vaccine skepticism spreads, the success of the smallpox campaign offers a reminder that the protection modern societies enjoy is neither automatic nor guaranteed.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.