William Foege, a towering figure in public health who implemented a strategy to eliminate smallpox, has passed away at age 89.
In December of 1966, Foege was running a medical center in West Africa and awaiting a large shipment of smallpox vaccine. As a consultant to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, he was planning a massive immunization campaign. The goal: Inoculate as many people as possible. This strategy was expensive, but conventional public health wisdom said it was the only choice; even with 90 percent coverage, outbreaks still occurred.
Foege soon realized that to deploy the conventional public health strategy, immunization teams working for the CDC and the World Health Organization would need a supply of vaccines that was simply untenable given manufacturing and supply chain constraints.
Foege developed a new approach, which he called “surveillance and containment” and which is now known as a “ring vaccination”: to strategically deploy limited resources—vaccine supplies and the public health workers who administer the inoculations—in order to contain and eliminate the disease in the places where it was spreading. This strategy enabled the effective eradication of smallpox in a little more than a decade.
Foege later led the CDC during the Carter and Reagan administrations, and subsequently brought his expertise to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2001, he was honored with a Lasker Public Service Award for “courageous leadership in improving worldwide public health, and his prominent role in the eradication of smallpox.”
