<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America, where we

<v Speaker 1>dig a little deeper into American history looking for those

<v Speaker 1>unsung heroes who did amazing things and then fell through

<v Speaker 1>the cracks of history. Let me take you to a

<v Speaker 1>little mission hospital in eastern Nigeria. It's December of nineteen

<v Speaker 1>sixty six. It's the dry season, the kind of heat

<v Speaker 1>that just sits on you all day. There's a young

<v Speaker 1>American doctor there. He's a tall fellow, about six foot seven.

<v Speaker 1>He had to duck through every doorway he ever met.

<v Speaker 1>His name is Bill Fagi. Now remember that name because

<v Speaker 1>most folks never learned it, and it belongs to a

<v Speaker 1>man who saved more lives than just about anybody who

<v Speaker 1>ever drew breath from Hey Dad Productions. This is Anonymous America.

<v Speaker 1>In December of nineteen sixty six, Bill Faggi got a

<v Speaker 1>radio message somewhere out in the bush, in a village

<v Speaker 1>a good ways off. There was an outbreak of small pox,

<v Speaker 1>and Bill Fagi had a problem. He didn't have nearly

<v Speaker 1>enough vaccine to do what every expert in the world

<v Speaker 1>told him he was supposed to do. Now, let me

<v Speaker 1>tell you a little bit about smallpox. Because we've been

<v Speaker 1>lucky enough to forget about it. Smallpox is the deadliest

<v Speaker 1>disease in the history of the human race, not one

<v Speaker 1>of the deadliest, the deadliest. It rode with the Pharaohs.

<v Speaker 1>You can see the scars on the mummy of Rameses

<v Speaker 1>the Fifth. It burned through Rome. When it landed in

<v Speaker 1>the Americas, it killed Native Americans by the millions. In

<v Speaker 1>the twentieth century alone, the century of penicillin and airplanes

<v Speaker 1>and the moon landing, smallpox killed somewhere around three hundred

<v Speaker 1>million people. Three hundred million. And here's what it did

<v Speaker 1>to you. First, there was a fever. Then the rash,

<v Speaker 1>sores that filled your entire body, in your mouth and

<v Speaker 1>your throat, on the soles of your feet. About a

<v Speaker 1>third of the people who caught smallpox died, and the

<v Speaker 1>ones who lived were left pocked in scars, and a

<v Speaker 1>good many of them were left blind. There was no cure.

<v Speaker 1>There was never a cure. All anybody ever had against

<v Speaker 1>smallpox was a vaccine. And the plan, the grand plan,

<v Speaker 1>was to vaccinate every single human being on planet Earth,

<v Speaker 1>every last one. That was the strategy corner of the

<v Speaker 1>whole world at once. Trouble is that's pretty much impossible

<v Speaker 1>because you can't find everybody, you can't reach everybody, and

<v Speaker 1>out in the bush. In December of nineteen sixty six,

<v Speaker 1>Bill Faggi sure couldn't vaccinate everybody. He barely had enough

<v Speaker 1>vaccine for a tiny fraction of the people who were

<v Speaker 1>in harm's way. So Bill Faggy did what desperate smart

<v Speaker 1>people do. He stopped and he thought. He got on

<v Speaker 1>the radio to a network missionary scattered around the region,

<v Speaker 1>and he asked them, go find the cases, every village,

<v Speaker 1>every case of smallpox you can lay eyes on, get

<v Speaker 1>word to me. And they did, runners radios, whatever they had,

<v Speaker 1>And as those reports came in, Bill started sticking pins

<v Speaker 1>in a map. And as he looked at that map,

<v Speaker 1>he realized something small box couldn't fly, It couldn't jump.

<v Speaker 1>To spread, It had to pass from a sick person

<v Speaker 1>to a well person up close. So if you knew

<v Speaker 1>where the fire was burning, if you knew exactly which

<v Speaker 1>villages had it, you didn't have to soak the whole forest.

<v Speaker 1>You just had to build a fire break around the

<v Speaker 1>main flame. And that's what he did. Instead of trying

<v Speaker 1>to vaccinate everybody on the planet, he vaccinated the ring

<v Speaker 1>of people around each individual outbreak, the family, the neighbors,

<v Speaker 1>the village down the road where the sickness was on

<v Speaker 1>its way. Next, just cut the disease off surround it,

<v Speaker 1>giving nobody to jump to and let it burn itself

<v Speaker 1>out with nowhere to go. They came to call it

<v Speaker 1>ring vaccination or containment, or my personal favorite, surveillance and containment.

<v Speaker 1>Find the fire, ring the fire, starve the fire, and

<v Speaker 1>it worked, and it worked fast in that region of Nigeria.

<v Speaker 1>With a tiny fraction of vaccine, everybody said that he needed.

<v Speaker 1>Bill Fagi's team stopped smallpox in its tracks in a

<v Speaker 1>matter of months. They found the Achilles heel of the enemy.

<v Speaker 1>Smallpox was deadly, but it was slow and it left tracks,

<v Speaker 1>and a slow enemy that leaves tracks is an enemy

<v Speaker 1>you can hunt. Word of what Bill had done in

<v Speaker 1>Nigeria made its way up the chain, and when the

<v Speaker 1>World Health Organization launched the Great Final Campaign to wipe

<v Speaker 1>smallpox off the face of the earth, they didn't try

<v Speaker 1>to vaccinate all four billion people. They used Bill's idea,

<v Speaker 1>find it, ring it, kill it, country by country, outbreak

<v Speaker 1>by outbreak, they chased the disease into a smaller and

<v Speaker 1>smaller corner of the world India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia. The

<v Speaker 1>circle just kept getting tighter and tighter, And in nineteen

<v Speaker 1>seventy seven, in a hospital cooking Somalia named Ali maut Malin,

<v Speaker 1>the world saw its last natural case of smallpox, the

<v Speaker 1>last one. After thousands of years and three hundred million

<v Speaker 1>dead in one century, it was over. In nineteen eighty

<v Speaker 1>the who stood up and declared smallpox eradicated gone. It

<v Speaker 1>is to this day the only human disease we have

<v Speaker 1>ever completely destroyed, the only one, and the strategy that

<v Speaker 1>did it was dreamed up by a tall, young doctor

<v Speaker 1>in a Nigerian village at night, holding a box of

<v Speaker 1>vaccine that wasn't nearly big enough. Bill Faggie went on

<v Speaker 1>to run the CDC, He advised presidents, He helped build

<v Speaker 1>the foundation work that vaccinates children all over the world today.

<v Speaker 1>He is, by any honest math, one of the greatest

<v Speaker 1>life savers that ever lived, A man whose one good

<v Speaker 1>idea is still saving lives in villages he will never see.

<v Speaker 1>And if you walked out on main Street right now

<v Speaker 1>and stopped one hundred people and asked them who Bill

<v Speaker 1>Fagy was, I'd bet you my last dollar not one

<v Speaker 1>of them could tell you. Not one. We remember the

<v Speaker 1>people who took lives. We build statues to the generals.

<v Speaker 1>But the guy who cornered the deadliest killer in human

<v Speaker 1>history and choked it out of existence, he just lived quietly,

<v Speaker 1>and as far as history is concerned, he lives quiet still.

<v Speaker 1>Most of the world he saved has never heard of him,

<v Speaker 1>but you're hearing of him. That's Bill Fagy, and that's

<v Speaker 1>anonymous America.