The SARS virus of 2003, the alarm that we now know signaled the modern pandemic era, gone. Variola, the agent of smallpox? That virus was eradicated in the wild by 1977, but now it vanishes from the high-security freezers where the last spooky samples are stored. Nobody suffers anymore from chicken pox, hepatitis, shingles, or even the common cold. Herpes B, carried by some monkeys, often fatal when passed to humans, gone. All the rotaviruses, gone, a great mercy to children in developing countries who die by the hundreds of thousands each year. Nipah and Hendra and Machupo and Sin Nombre are gone-never mind their records of ugly mayhem. HIV is gone, and so the AIDS catastrophe never happened. Vast reductions of human misery and death. The measles virus, the mumps virus, and the various influenzas are gone. The gruesomely lethal Ebola virus is gone. Let’s imagine planet Earth without viruses. This story appears in the February 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.
