Bee Bloeser: Sending Smallpox Into History

Join us in person or on-line!
Program: Bee Bloeser will provide a picture of the historic achievement of eradicating smallpox,
the first and only time in history a human disease has been wiped off the face of the
earth. After touching on background about the disease and the scope of its devastation,
she will discuss the domestic and Cold War rivalries that delayed, and finally launched,
the global Smallpox Eradication Program. From her vantage point as an embedded
spouse with the U.S.-led West Africa phase of the global campaign, she will share on-
the-ground operations and their complexities along with the eventual successful human
victory over the disease.

Key takeaway: Vaccines without effective systems and political buy-in save no one.

Our Speaker: Bee Bloeser, M.A. lived in West Africa, the Middle East, and Native
American nations supporting her late husband’s global public health work, and in her
own career as a medical speech-language pathologist. Her award-winning historical
memoir, Vaccines & Bayonets: Fighting Smallpox in Africa amid Tribalism, Terror
and the Cold War has been praised by editors with The Economist and Foreign Policy
magazines as well as by the late Dr. William Foege, former director of the CDC.

Free and open to the public.
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88193881833

Co-sponsored by the Humanist Society of Santa Barbara and the Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Congregation