"Richard Preston - The Demon In The Freezer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

tracked outbreaks of smallpox and swooped in and vaccinated everyone in a ring around the outbreak
(as they would do in Meschede in 1970), which broke the chains of transmission and snuffed out the
virus in that spot.
One of the lesser-known reasons for the eradication of smallpox was the desire of the doctors to
eradicate vaccinia virus along with smallpox. Vaccinia gave a fairly high rate of complications, and it
could make some people very sick or kill them. About one in a million people who got the vaccine
during the Eradication died of it, and a larger number of people got very sick from it. The eradicators
wanted to eliminate the need for vaccination, and the way to do that was to get rid of the disease. A
study done by the WHO suggested that the world was losing one and a half billion dollars a year in
economic damage caused by illness and complications from the vaccine.
William H. Foege is the doctor who pioneered ring vaccination. Foege, a tall, brilliant, deeply
religious man, first used ring vaccination on a wide scale in Nigeria in November 1966, as an act of
desperation, because he had run out of enough vaccine to immunize everybody in the area of a major
outbreak. It worked surprisingly well, and as ring vaccinations proceeded and as outbreaks were
choked off by rings of immune people, the eradicators began to believe that they really could wipe
smallpox from the earth. The feeling was intoxicating to the eradicators. As it became clearer that the
job could be done, D. A. Henderson became uncompromising as a leader. He inspired deep loyalty and
affection, and he displayed the ruthlessness of a winning general. Henderson proved to be one of the
geniuses in the history of management. There were normally only about eight people at headquarters,
including secretaries, yet the program was a sprawling multinational operation (hundreds of thousands of
health workers eventually were on salary, either part-time or full-time), and it operated all over the world,
sometimes in countries engaged in civil war. His most important task was hiring the best people and
giving them clear goals. Henderson's way of firing people was to suggest to them that there were jobs
that were less demanding. As he explained to me, "Unless you are in a position to be tough with people,
you aren't going to go forward." Either you were marching along with D. A. Henderson or you were lying
flat on your face and getting a massage with tank treads.
I once asked D. A. Henderson how he felt about his role in ending smallpox. "I'm one of many in
the Eradication," he answered. "There's Frank Fenner, there's Isao Arita, Bill Foege, Nicole Grasset,
Zdenek Jezek, Jock Copeland, John Wickett-I could come up with fifty names. Let alone the thousands
who worked in the infected countries." Even so, Henderson was the Eisenhower of the Eradication.
John Wickett was a Canadian ski bum and computer programmer who turned up in Geneva in
1971, wanting to ski the Alps while earning a little money on the side working with computers. For some
reason, D. A. Henderson hired him to eradicate smallpox. Henderson had an uncanny nose for human
potential in the people he hired. Today, John Wickett is widely credited as having played a big role in the
Eradication. "Eradicating smallpox was the most fun I ever had," Wickett said to me. "It was fun
because we actually did it and because D.A. was behind us. He could make the bureaucracy jump.
When I had a problem with some bureaucrat, I'd say, `Do you want to talk to my boss?' And I'd hear,
'No. .. ' and the problem would get fixed."


Strange Trip

In the summer of 1970, a twenty-six-year-old medical doctor named Lawrence Brilliant finished
his internship at Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco. He had been diagnosed with a tumor of the
parathyroid gland and was recovering from an operation, so he was not able to go on with his residency.
He was living on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, where he was giving medical help to a group of
Native Americans who had occupied Alcatraz in a protest. He ended up doing some interviews on
television from the island, and a producer from Warner Bros. saw one of them and offered him a role in a
movie. The movie was Medicine Ball Caravan, about hippies who go to England and end up at a Pink
Floyd concert. Larry Brilliant played a doctor. ("It was such a shitty movie I don't even expect my kids