The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty

by Peter Singer

The most impressive example of what aid can do is the eradication of smallpox. For at least 3,000 years, smallpox was a fearsome scourge of humankind. Of those infected by it, almost 1 in 3 died a painful, miserable death. The survivors also experienced pain and distress. Many were left blind and/or permanently disfigured. As recently as 1967, smallpox caused 2 million deaths, distributed across 43 countries.[ccxx] Ten years later, it had been completely eradicated (except for one subsequent death as a result of poor safety procedures at the University of Birmingham Medical School, in England, where the virus was being studied). The eradication was the result of a concerted global vaccination campaign, first proposed in 1958 by the Soviet Union’s Deputy Minister for Health, a virologist named Viktor Zhdanov, and then taken up by the World Health Organization. In the first 60 years of the 20th century, smallpox killed between 1.5 and 3 million people every year. If we conservatively use the low end of this range, its eradication—42 years ago at the time of writing—has saved the lives of 63 million people, and prevented another 147 million from suffering from a painful and debilitating disease. This is, as William MacAskill points out in his book Doing Good Better, about five times the number of people killed in all the wars, atrocities, and terrorist attacks that have taken place since the 1970s, including the killing fields of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the 1994 massa...