So, **William H. Foege** is dead. He was 89. You probably don’t know his name because he didn’t optimize his personal brand for TikTok or scream on Twitter. He didn’t dye his hair orange or forget where he was on stage. All he did was save the entire human race from a monster. He is the epidemiologist who mastered **smallpox eradication**. And now that he’s gone, it feels like the last metric of common sense just dropped to zero, and we are locked inside with the maniacs.

Let’s analyze the KPIs of what this guy actually did. Smallpox was a nightmare. It killed millions. It didn’t care if you were rich or poor. It was ugly, painful, and terrified the world. And what did Foege do? He didn’t start a podcast about it. He didn’t make a hashtag. He executed a **global health strategy** called “containment” (specifically **surveillance containment**). Instead of trying to give a shot to every single person on earth—which is operationally impossible—he found where the sick people were. He drew a circle around them. He gave shots to everyone in that circle. He suffocated the virus. He used his brain. Remember brains? We used to have those.

Looking back at what Foege achieved in the 1970s is painful. It hurts because it highlights the severe degradation of our current systems. Back then, people saw a deadly disease and said, “Let’s get rid of it.” Today? If smallpox showed up tomorrow, our bounce rate would be 100%. We would be absolutely finished. Half the country would claim the virus is a government psy-op. The other half would try to cancel the virus for being problematic. The politicians would argue about whose fault it is while the cities burned down. We can’t even agree on what time it is anymore. Foege lived in a world where results mattered. We live in a world where engagement metrics matter.

He also served as the **CDC Director** for a while. Imagine that. Imagine a time when the people in charge actually possessed domain authority. Now, look at our leaders. Look at the suits in Washington. Do you trust any of them to organize a bake sale, let alone a global health war? The Right is too busy counting their money and cutting corners. The Left is too busy auditing the vocabulary on the forms. Meanwhile, the infrastructure crumbles and inflation spikes. Foege was a giant walking among ants. He did the work. He didn’t do it for the fame. He did it because the data showed people were dying, and he knew how to stop it.

He spent his life pushing for kids to get vaccinated. That used to be standard operating procedure. You didn’t want your kid to get sick, so you went to the doctor. Simple. Now? It’s a culture war. We have turned basic survival into a political game. You have people screaming that science is fake. You have other people treating science like a dogmatic religion that can never be questioned. Both sides are loud, and both sides are annoying. Foege just looked at the data and saved lives. It must have been exhausting for him to watch the world’s IQ drop every year he stayed alive.

Think about the strategy he used. It was smart. It was efficient. He didn’t waste resources. He targeted the problem directly. Compare that to how we handle things now. When the government tries to fix something today, they just print a trillion dollars and set it on fire. They throw money at their friends and hope the problem goes away. It never does. The pothole stays in the road. The schools stay bad. The debt gets bigger. We replaced strategy with noise. We replaced competence with yelling.

It is almost funny, in a dark way. Foege helped wipe out a disease to save humanity. He gave us a gift. He gave us a future where we didn’t have to worry about our skin boiling off from smallpox. And what did we do with that gift? We used our extra bandwidth to fight about electric stoves and plastic straws. We used our health to sit on the couch and doom-scroll through angry videos. We took a miracle and wasted it.

He died at 89. That is a long life. He saw the best of us, and he saw the worst of us. I wonder if he had any regrets at the end. Not about his work—his work was optimized perfectly. But about us. Did he look at the news and wonder why he bothered? Did he look at the shouting heads on TV and think, “I saved them for this?”

The era of the adults is over. The people who built things, fixed things, and solved things are leaving us one by one. Foege is gone. The heavy lifters are checking out. Now we are left with the grifters, the clowns, and the crybabies. Good luck to us. We are going to need it.

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### References & Fact-Check * **Original Event**: William H. Foege, the epidemiologist credited with devising the strategy to eradicate smallpox, passed away at age 89. * **Source Authority**: [The New York Times: William H. Foege, Key Figure in the Eradication of Smallpox, Dies at 89](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/william-h-foege-dead.html) * **Historical Context**: Dr. Foege is recognized for developing the "surveillance containment" (or ring vaccination) strategy in Nigeria in the late 1960s, which became the blueprint for the global eradication campaign.