Did We Lose Track of Earth's Deadliest Virus?

Below Zero: Where Humanity Keeps Its Worst Nightmare

Somewhere within the labyrinthine corridors of the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, sits a heavily padlocked freezer. This freezer is chained to the floor, disguised to avoid prying and casual eyes, and guarded by armed federal marshals. You could be looking directly at the freezer and never know. There are even decoy freezers just in case. Because inside exists humanity's darkest threat: the smallpox virus.

At -321 degrees Fahrenheit, frozen in time, lies the virus that killed more humans on Earth than all of history's wars combined. It killed one billion people in the last 100 years of its existence alone.

As a general rule of thumb variola, or smallpox, kills 1 out of 3 people and inhaling just 1-3 infectious particles is enough to become sick.

But then on December 9, 1979 smallpox was eradicated from the planet.

….or so we thought.

Today’s Substack investigates the question that haunts the world's leading epidemiologists: Did we really cage the demon, or did we simply lose track of where it roams?

The official narrative is reassuring enough: smallpox exists in only two places on Earth—that freezer in Atlanta and another at Vector, a former Soviet bioweapons facility in Siberia. But this comforting notion may be more fiction than fact.