Charting a course for equal access to immunization

摘要

My decades of work in global health have taught me that disease is a nimble opponent that seeks to strike people down relentlessly. When I worked in Ethiopia during the 1970s, smallpox vaccination was essentially unknown, and the lack of smallpox surveillance meant that tens of thousands of cases went unnoticed by the rest of the world. So, we started a program to track cases of smallpox and to vaccinate at-risk communities. Fuelled by this intense focus, by 1976 the number of smallpox cases in Ethiopia dropped from 26,000 to zero. Our success in eradicating smallpox in Ethiopia and, eventually in the rest of the world shows us that if we wisely harness the power of vaccines, we have the ability to transform the fight against infectious disease into sustainable victory.