Every Nation's Needle

On May 8, 1980, the Thirty-Third World Health Assembly stood and did something unprecedented — they declared that humanity had defeated smallpox forever. A disease that had killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century alone was gone from the earth.

But the victory belonged to no single nation. When D.A. Henderson launched the WHO's Intensified Eradication Program in 1967, the campaign required something almost as miraculous as the medicine itself: cooperation. At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union donated 450 million doses of vaccine while the United States provided funding and technical expertise. Health workers from over forty nations fanned out across West Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the Horn of Africa. They adopted a "ring vaccination" strategy, surrounding each new outbreak until the disease had nowhere left to go. The last natural case struck Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merka, Somalia, on October 26, 1977. He survived.

No single country could have accomplished this alone. It took the whole human family pulling together to swallow up a killer.

Isaiah 25:8 promises a day when God "will swallow up death forever" and "wipe away the tears from all faces." What the nations achieved against smallpox is a faint but real foretaste of that promise. And if fractured, rival nations could unite to end one plague, how much more will the people of God — working together under His sovereign hand — become instruments of the healing He has already declared complete?