I feel deeply saddened to learn about the passing of Dr. William Foege, a true giant of global public health and one of UNICEF's greatest champions.
Dr. Foege was a close partner of UNICEF Executive Director James Grant. At Jim's request, Bill Foege headed the Task Force for Child Survival, bringing together UNICEF, WHO, UNDP, the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID/CDC to mobilize support for child survival and development globally and at the US Congress. Dr. Foege's impeccable credentials, high credibility and eloquent advocacy greatly helped the UNICEF-led child survival and development revolution in the 1980s and 90s.
Dr. Foege served as the US representative to the UNICEF Executive Board. The US President Bill Clinton had nominated him as the first candidate to succeed Jim Grant, followed by other candidates later.
Dr. Foege was a senior advisor and mentor to Bill Gates. Gates credits Foege as the key person who persuaded him to devote the rest of his life and much of his fortune to promoting child survival with particular focus on immunization through the Gates Foundation and GAVI.
Personally, I considered Bill Foege as one of my most revered mentors, next only to Jim Grant.
I will be writing an obituary/tribute to him soon and will share it with you and ex-UNICEF colleagues.
Meanwhile, I trust that UNICEF will issue an appropriate official tribute to him.
William H. Foege, Key Figure in the Eradication of Smallpox, Dies at 89
Keith Schneider and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, January 24, 2026
William H. Foege, who developed the vaccination strategy that helped eradicate smallpox in the 1970s and led the CDC during the early AIDS epidemic, died January 25, 2026, at his home in Atlanta at age 89 from congestive heart failure.
As a missionary doctor in Nigeria in 1966, Foege developed the "ring vaccination" strategy when vaccine supplies ran short, identifying infected individuals, isolating them, and vaccinating those in contact with them to build containment rings around outbreaks. This approach, inspired by wildfire containment methods, proved more efficient than mass vaccination and became the primary tactic for eradicating smallpox in West and Central Africa by 1970 and later in India by 1975.
The last known smallpox case occurred in Somalia in 1978, with WHO declaring the disease eradicated in 1980. As CDC director from 1977-1983 under Presidents Carter and Reagan, Foege expanded the agency's focus beyond infectious disease to auto injuries and gun violence, and built the initial CDC response to AIDS despite budget cuts and White House indifference.
After leaving government in 1983, he led the Task Force for Child Survival, increasing global childhood vaccination rates from 15 percent to 80 percent by 1990, and later served as executive director of the Carter Center and senior fellow with the Gates Foundation, influencing the creation of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. In his final years, Foege became a prominent critic of both Trump administrations' public health policies and was particularly outspoken against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s views on vaccination.
"We've broken every rule that we've learned on disease control. The first and most important rule is to know the truth. You have to set up a surveillance system to know the truth, otherwise you're responding blindly."
"Kennedy's words can be as lethal as the smallpox virus."
"He thought that public health has a basic responsibility to take care of not just the people right next to us, but everybody, and he expanded that concept of everybody in the world to everybody who's going to be born in the future." - Dr. Mark Rosenberg
Thanks for sharing the NYTt article. He was indeed a great friend of UNI and a personal friend of our beloved Jim Grant.
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