Smallpox could still have existed today

Published on May 8, 2026 6:54 AM GMTI am not a historian of public health. The facts here come primarily from D.A. Henderson's autobiography Smallpox: The Death of a Disease (2009). I used an LLM to help draft sections of this post, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively.Forty-six years ago today, on May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly officially declared smallpox eradicated from Earth. It was the first and so far only time humanity has deliberately driven a disease to extinction. The Unite...