Russian–United States vaccine science diplomacy: Preserving the legacy

United States-Russia tensions over the hostilities in Ukraine, collapsed cease-fires and chemical weapons use in Syria, and accusations of alleged cyberattacks may require a diplomatic reset.To help ease growing strains and restore dialogue and cooperation, it is worth looking to a productive and extraordinary historical record of international scientific collaborations.Throughout the last half of the 20th century, the United States and Soviet Union managed a complex Cold War foreign policy relationship by opening and maintaining channels in sports, the arts, literature, and other humanitarian endeavors.One of the most productive engagements was through a mostly clandestine joint initiative to develop, test, and deliver life-saving vaccines that targeted the ancient scourges of humankind.Ultimately, through Cold War vaccine diplomacy, smallpox was eradicated, and polio was mostly eliminated [1].In 1956, a year before the Sputnik launch, the US State Department and its counterpart in the Soviet Union facilitated links between the American virologist Dr. Albert Sabin and two Soviet virologists, Drs.Mikhail Chumakov and Anatoli Smorodintsev, to collaborate in producing the oral polio vaccine at a scale suitable for testing it first on millions of Soviet citizens [2].Watched closely by a suspected KGB operative, the Russian virologists visited Sabin in his Cincinnati Children's Hospital research laboratory, and this was followed by Sabin's reciprocal visit to Moscow in the same year [2].Within two years, a shipment of Sabin's polio virus strains arrived in the Soviet Union on dry ice.The vaccine was scaled up and produced in Chumakov's laboratory, but clinical testing required him to bypass an obstructionist Soviet Minister of Health and go directly to the Kremlin leadership for large-scale trials to proceed [2].Through the Sabin-Chumakov collaboration, the vaccine was tested initially on millions of school children and subsequently on young adults.A World Health Organization (WHO) representative confirmed the safety of the trials and the vaccine's ability to prevent poliomyelitis.The vaccine has now been used to stop polio transmission everywhere except Afghanistan and Pakistan.On the heels of the polio vaccine licensure, Soviet scientists developed a unique process for preserving the smallpox vaccine in harsh environments to produce hundreds of millions of doses of freeze-dried vaccine.This proved to be a key enabling technology for the American public health physician D. A. Henderson (who passed away in 2016) to lead a celebrated campaign that eradicated smallpox by 1977 [1].Indeed, it was Viktor Zhdanov, a Soviet virologist and deputy health minister, who (in 1958) first proposed the concept of smallpox eradication to the WHO and led vaccine production and donation efforts [3].