“In 1958, Zhdanov was a deputy minister of health for the Soviet Union. In May of that year, at the Eleventh World Health Assembly meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the Soviet Union’s first appearance in the assembly after a nine-year absence, Zhdanov described a visionary plan to eradicate smallpox. At the time, no disease had ever before been eradicated. No one knew if it could even be done. And no one expected such a suggestion to come from the USSR. But he conveyed his message with passion, conviction and optimism, boldly suggesting that the disease could be eradicated within ten years. Since smallpox was an exclusively human disease, he argued, it would be easier to eradicate than mosquito-borne infections such as malaria. He pointed to the Soviet Union’s success at eliminating smallpox, despite its vast territory and poor transportation networks. … By the force of his arguments, Zhdanov was successful. For the first time in its history, the WHO agreed to form a campaign to completely eradicate a disease. To assess how much good Zhdanov did, we should bear in mind that, even if he had not lobbied the WHO, smallpox would probably have been eradicated anyway. The problem was serious enough that someone would have started a campaign to fix it. Many of those 120 million lives that have been saved by smallpox eradication would therefore have been saved anyway. But there would probably have been a considerable delay in the smallpox eradication campaign. Suppose, therefore, that Zhdanov moved forward the eradication of smallpox by a decade. If so, then he alone prevented between 10 and 20 million deaths – about as much as if he’d achieved three decades of world peace.
Viktor Zdanov
Estimate of lives saved: 15 million
This from Doing Good Better by William MacAskill
“In 1958, Zhdanov was a deputy minister of health for the Soviet Union. In May of that year, at the Eleventh World Health Assembly meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the Soviet Union’s first appearance in the assembly after a nine-year absence, Zhdanov described a visionary plan to eradicate smallpox. At the time, no disease had ever before been eradicated. No one knew if it could even be done. And no one expected such a suggestion to come from the USSR. But he conveyed his message with passion, conviction and optimism, boldly suggesting that the disease could be eradicated within ten years. Since smallpox was an exclusively human disease, he argued, it would be easier to eradicate than mosquito-borne infections such as malaria. He pointed to the Soviet Union’s success at eliminating smallpox, despite its vast territory and poor transportation networks.
…
By the force of his arguments, Zhdanov was successful. For the first time in its history, the WHO agreed to form a campaign to completely eradicate a disease. To assess how much good Zhdanov did, we should bear in mind that, even if he had not lobbied the WHO, smallpox would probably have been eradicated anyway. The problem was serious enough that someone would have started a campaign to fix it. Many of those 120 million lives that have been saved by smallpox eradication would therefore have been saved anyway. But there would probably have been a considerable delay in the smallpox eradication campaign. Suppose, therefore, that Zhdanov moved forward the eradication of smallpox by a decade. If so, then he alone prevented between 10 and 20 million deaths – about as much as if he’d achieved three decades of world peace.