A thread. Looking for something thrilling to watch during #CoronavirusLockdown? A TV doc about a killer virus may seem a strange choice but trust me 'Smallpox: On Death Row" is a wonderful lesson from history that will lift your spirits. Here's a link:- ok.ru/video/28195016…
2./ This film was made by Bettina Lerner, way back in 1997. She'd go on to transform the 'Horizon' series (and be my mentor and boss) and this combines her trademark brilliant story-telling and rich layers of factual information. See if you can guess its unlikely end!
3./ The show traces the breathtakingly bold attempt to eradicate one of the world's deadliest diseases. Smallpox killed 300M people in the 20th Century alone. It regularly wiped out 10% of the UK's population in a year.
4./ A new outbreak could easily kill 20-30% of all those infected. In severe cases the blisters were so dense they formed suppurating sheets that peeled off excrutiatingly in layers of raw skin. If we could beat smallpox....we can surely beat coronavirus.
5./ Smallpox haunted humanity since the Pharoahs, changed the course of history many times, and scarred survivors indelibly. Then in 1959 human beings did something extraordinary. At the height of the Cold War we declared war on a common enemy : the smallpox virus.
6./ It took until 1967 to make real progress. At the heart of the film is a lovely scene of a convivial gathering (remember them?) in which the team led by the late, great Donald A Henderson recollect their heroic efforts. No they don't sit two metres apart.👇👇
7./ The future of the World Health Organisation hung on their success. WHO had been outwitted by malaria the first disease they'd attempted to eradicate. But with smallpox they now had a huge advantage: a successful and safe vaccine.
8./ Their initial strategy was almost unbelievably ambitious: to vaccinate every person on the planet. And the clock was ticking. The vaccine didn't offer everyone a lifetime of immunity so if they didn't work as fast as possible they might have to start all over again. 👇👇
9./ The strategists depended on thousands of doctors, nurses and volunteers who often took their lives in their hands spanning out across the globe. Sound familiar? In just one week they visited 100 Million homes in India alone.👇👇
10./ Nowhere was too remote. No one too isolated. And remember this was before GPS, the internet, google maps or mobile phones. What they lacked in technology they made up for in sheer grit and determination. 👇👇
11./ As the number of infections plummeted they soon realised they could now pivot and focus their efforts. Instead of vaccinating absolutely everyone they decided to pour their efforts into the dwindling number of outbreaks. But there was a surprising obstacle.
12./ By 1977 there was just one small outbreak left, in Somalia where they finally tracked down the young man who was the very last person with smallpox on the planet. He'd avoided being vaccinated because it seemed painful.
13./ Ali Maow Maalin survived. He also deserves to be celebrated in his own right. Ali was determined to make up for his youthful foolishness. He became a health worker himself and died in 2013 of malaria while carrying out vaccinations against a sudden polio outbreak. RIP Ali.
14./ Ali's quarantine in 1977 marked the end of smallpox's rampage. Watch the film to see the series of astonishing twists and turns that followed, including one final shocking and mysterious death, before the fate of the last samples of the virus came to be debated.
15./ There are many links to our crisis today in this story. The virus behind COVID-19 seems to have made a leap from bats to humans. Smallpox too may have made a similar jump; from a rodent. It was also the struggle against smallpox that may bequeath us our best weapon
16./ If we're ever to beat coronavirus completely we'll need a vaccine. It was Edward Jenner who invented this term derived from the Latin for cow. He realised that milkmaids who came down with the similar but much milder disease, cowpox, never seemed to come down with smallpox.
17./ Cowpox and smallpox are caused by closely related viruses. If you train the immune system to recognise one you teach it to recognise and defend the body against the other. While coronaviruses don't work like that luckily vaccines have also come a long way since then.
18./ At heart the principle remains the same as that laid out by Louis Pasteur who was the first person to understand vaccination scientifically. In his lab he took samples from infected animals or people and treated them with heat or chemicals until the pathogen was too weak..
19./ ...or too dead to cause disease but still somehow potent enough to induce the body's defensive immune reactions. This is Pasteur's tomb under the Institute that bears his name. When this is all over go see it and thank the man yourself. 
20./ His successors are working just metres away as part of an international effort to crack coronavirus. Nowadays they try to disable the virus at the genetic level, while leaving enough information in a virus particle for our bodies to be triggered into an immune reaction.
21./ Pasteur had no idea what genes were but that didn't stop him creating vaccines that conquered two age-old killers: anthrax and rabies. Here's just a glimpse of how complex modern manufacture of vaccines can be from one of the world's leading firms. sanofi.com/en/media-room/…
22./ Any vaccine is likely a long way away, perhaps 18 months away. And it's not guaranteed. But as scientists work desperately to invent one and test drugs that can treat COVID-19 we can at least take heart as a species we've beaten worse foes than coronavirus before.
23./ Humanity overcame smallpox with a combination of Jenner and Pasteur's brilliant legacy, the optimism of the post war era that gave us the WHO, and a determination to stick to a plan whatever the obstacles, as well as the good sense to adjust it when science dictated.
24./ Above all international coordination allowed the best minds on the planet to rise above politics. So raise a glass to Donald A Henderson and his bold team of health warriors who were dedicated to the principle that it's the virus that's the enemy, not each other.
