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Good News is a newsletter written by Bryan Walsh, an editorial director at Vox. He oversees the Future Perfect, tech, climate, and world teams, all of which cover stories that are both important and overlooked. |
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Good News is a newsletter written by Bryan Walsh, an editorial director at Vox. He oversees the Future Perfect, tech, climate, and world teams, all of which cover stories that are both important and overlooked. |
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Hey readers,
If there’s one thing most of us can agree on, it’s that social media is terrible, horrible, no good, very bad. I sure believe it, and not just because I can’t get anyone to like my Instagram posts. I mean just look at… everything. It’s bad for your attention span, bad for your reputation, and it makes Mark Zuckerberg richer. It’s hard to imagine a single thing that social media provides that we wouldn’t be better off without, with the possible exception of hearing about distant connections’ work anniversaries on LinkedIn.
And yet, the science connecting social media use to worsening mental health has always been a little unclear. Which is why this recent piece in the Guardian caught my attention:
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As I’ve mentioned before, a finding like this is what we call a “narrative violation” — a discovery or fact that seems to call into question something everyone believes is true. Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11-to-14-year-olds for three school years, and tracked both their self-reported social media uses and their gaming habits. They found no evidence that heavier social media use or gaming increased symptoms of anxiety or depression.
On top of this, another new study out of Australia — which just banned social media for under-16-year-olds — found that moderate use was associated with the best mental health outcomes, while both high use and zero use were associated with worse outcomes.
What does this all mean, beyond arming teenagers who are trying to strong-arm their parents into getting them phones? Well, as the researchers in the Australian study write, “social media’s association with adolescent well-being is complex and nonlinear,” which is another way of saying 🤷. But perhaps this younger generation, which has always lived in a world with social media, is proving more resilient to the effects. Certainly there’s some evidence that the vibes are shifting among teens, at least in how they view the apps. Of course, we don’t need peer-reviewed studies to judge for ourselves that too much time on the phone is bad, and our 8-year-old son won’t be getting one this decade or (ideally) the next. But these apps aren’t going away, so evidence of some resilience represents good news. As always, email bryan.walsh@vox.com for comments, questions, and LinkedIn connections (which I probably will forget to follow up on.) Read on for:
An AI science tool! 🤖 An organ transplant record! ♥️ More life! ⚕️ But first… |
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The main thing: The man who helped eradicate one of humanity's worst diseases |
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William Foege, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images |
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Had William Foege been a military general or a CEO or a politician, his death on January 24 would have been bold-type, front-page news. Elementary schools and highways would have been named after him.
Instead, Foege’s passing registered the way the deaths of many public health giants do: as a quiet tremor among the people who know what they did, and a barely-noticed headline for the rest of us.
Which, perhaps, is the perfect epitaph for his life’s work. Foege’s greatest accomplishment was that we don’t have to think about his greatest accomplishment: developing the ring vaccination strategy that helped eradicate smallpox from the face of the Earth.
It makes sense if you’re only passingly familiar with smallpox. The disease was declared eradicated in the US in 1949, and Americans haven’t been routinely vaccinated against it for more than 50 years. But smallpox was one of the deadliest viruses in human history, killing an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone. For centuries smallpox was simply a background fact of civilization, the way “flu season” is a background fact now — except with grotesquely higher stakes.
The eradication of smallpox, which was formally declared on May 8, 1980, is a civilizational achievement I’d put on par with any other, all the more so because it was a collaborative global effort. Humanity took a disease that had been killing us for thousands of years, one so merciless that it single-handedly destroyed empires, and eliminated it forever. If you asked me to identify the height of what human beings can do when they work together on a single goal, I would point to this.
The cruel irony, though, is that Foege’s death comes at a moment when the US government is turning its back on vaccination, and standing idly by while long-conquered diseases like measles come roaring back. And it’s happening in part because we’ve mistaken the quiet of victory — the victory won by Foege and his colleagues — for proof that there never was a war.
We couldn’t be more wrong. |
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Smallpox had been killing human beings for at least 3,000 years; the mummified head of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses V, who died 1157 BCE, shows evidence of the distinct, bumpy rash that made smallpox so horrifyingly visible. Three in 10 people who contracted the highly contagious disease died, while survivors were often left scarred and even blinded.
So terrifying was smallpox, which was caused by the variola virus, that many religions and cultures had the equivalent of a “smallpox demon,” like India’s Shitala Mata. Smallpox was particularly dangerous to children, and in 17th-century England children were even not considered full members of the family until they had survived their smallpox infection.
The war against smallpox is almost as old as the disease itself. A thousand years ago, people in Asia were practicing a kind of vaccination-lite called variolation, deliberately infecting people with a mild case of the disease to guarantee immunity, though the process came with the risk of developing severe smallpox. And smallpox was the first disease to have a formal vaccine: in 1796 the British doctor Edward Jenner developed what he would call a vaccine from cowpox, a very mild version of the disease found in cows, which had the benefits of variolation without the risks.
Yet just having an incredibly effective vaccine wasn’t enough to fully defeat the disease, especially in poor countries. As late as 1967 — nearly 200 years after Jenner’s discovery — there were an estimated 10 to 15 million smallpox cases and as many as 2 million deaths per year. Even as some human beings were preparing to go to the moon, others were dying of the same disease that had killed pharaohs — and few people thought that would ever change.
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That very same year, a previously abandoned World Health Organization effort to eradicate smallpox was revived. Its chances of success, however, seemed slim. Scientists believed that at least 80 percent of every population had to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, but in high-density or war-torn areas like India or Nigeria, that seemed an impossible task.
William Foege made it possible. He was serving as a Lutheran missionary doctor when he began working for the effort in eastern Nigeria, where he and his team struggled to control outbreaks in isolated rural areas and with limited supplies of vaccine. But those limitations inspired him to change tactics. Instead of aiming for mass vaccination, his team prioritized finding people with smallpox, isolating them, and vaccinating their contacts and nearby communities.
The strategy became known as “ring vaccination,” and it was essential to the ultimate success of the smallpox eradication campaign. Foege’s team could stop an outbreak in its tracks by vaccinating as little as 7 percent of the population, simply by ensuring they were vaccinating the right 7 percent. Suddenly a goal that had seemed impossible — a world without smallpox — became realistic.
There were other advances that made eradication possible, like the bifurcated needle, which made vaccination campaigns cheaper and easier to deploy, as well as the development of a heat-stable, freeze-dried vaccine that could be stored without refrigeration. And very much unlike today, the smallpox campaign saw geopolitical enemies work together. The Soviet Union supplied freeze-dried vaccine that became foundational to eradication efforts in China and India, while the CDC’s Donald Henderson directed the international program.
In 1977, just 10 years after the intensified program was launched, a hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin became the last person on Earth to naturally contract smallpox. (The final person to die was Janet Parker, a medical photographer in the British city of Birmingham who tragically contracted the disease in a lab accident in 1978.) On May 8, 1980, after enough time had passed to be sure, the World Health Assembly declared that “the world and all its peoples had won freedom from smallpox.” A virus that had haunted humanity for thousands of years was gone.
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Foege’s career didn’t end with smallpox eradication. He would serve as CDC director under Presidents Carter and Reagan, and he was instrumental in pushing for global campaigns around childhood immunization. At each stop he was motivated by the belief that, with enough effort, infectious diseases could be rolled back.
As Foege once wrote: “Humanity does not have to live in a world of plagues, disastrous governments, conflict, and uncontrolled health risks. The coordinated action of a group of dedicated people can plan for and bring about a better future. The fact of smallpox eradication remains a constant reminder that we should settle for nothing less.”
But today, that “better future” seems further off than ever. The Trump administration has overhauled the childhood immunization schedule in the name of “aligning with peer countries,” shifting some shots away from routine recommendations and into murkier, more discretionary territory — the kind of ambiguity that reliably leads to fewer kids getting their shots.
As of January 29, the CDC had counted 588 measles cases already in 2026, with the vast majority linked to outbreaks that started last year; meanwhile, kindergarten measles vaccine coverage has fallen to 92.5 percent — well below the roughly 95 percent level that keeps measles from finding oxygen.
We are going in reverse, in part because we’ve forgotten the past we once lived with.
The point of smallpox eradication — the point of vaccination itself — is that when it’s working, nothing happens. No outbreaks, no headlines, no scars, no funerals. But “nothing happening” is not nature; it’s deliberate and difficult maintenance. If we want to honor William Foege, we don’t need to rename a highway. We need to defend the quiet he helped win — and refuse to relearn, the hard way, what the world looked like before people like him made it safer. |
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Good news, in one chart đź“Š |
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Indonesia’s clean-cooking shift is a reminder that “what’s for dinner?” can be a public-health question.
Burning wood, charcoal, dung, or kerosene in homes creates household air pollution — the kind that quietly drives heart disease, stroke, lung disease, and childhood pneumonia — and the WHO estimates it causes about 2.9 million premature deaths each year. Against that backdrop, Indonesia’s charted leap is huge: access to clean cooking fuels rose from 7 percent in 2000 to 91 percent in 2023, helped by a 2007 program switching households from kerosene to LPG. Death rates from indoor air pollution have fallen nearly fourfold over that time period.
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Satish Bate/Hindustan Times via Getty Images |
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Record year for transplants: Gift of Life Donor Program says it coordinated 1,955 organ transplants in 2025 — a national record for any US organ procurement organization — plus 725 organ donor “heroes,” the most in its 51-year history, using newer recovery and preservation tools. The Philadelphia-based OPO serves eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware, working with 123 acute care hospitals. It also logged 984 kidney transplants (10th straight year), 508 livers, and 180 hearts, all US highs.
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AI for science: This week OpenAI released its new Prism tool — a free, AI-native workspace for scientific writing and collaboration, powered by GPT-5.2. Instead of hopping between editors, PDFs, and separate chat tools, Prism keeps drafting, revision, equations, and citations in one cloud project, with GPT-5.2 working inside the document context. OpenAI says it supports unlimited projects and collaborators for personal accounts now, with business, enterprise, and education access coming soon.
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Driverless freight hits scale: Gatik AI says it’s operating fully driverless “freight-only” trucks at commercial scale in North America, making daily deliveries on public roads for Fortune 50 retailers with no driver or safety observer onboard. It reports about $600 million in contracted revenue across Dallas–Fort Worth, Phoenix, and northwest Arkansas. Since mid-2025, the company says its 26- and 30-foot trucks have completed 60,000 orders without incident and logged 10,000+ miles, all while running nearly 24 hours a day.
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Life expectancy rebounds: US life expectancy rose to a record 79 years in 2024 — six months higher than in 2023 — the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported. The jump reflects sharp declines in deaths from Covid-19 and drug overdoses. Covid deaths fell 37 percent, dropping from the 10th leading cause of death in 2023 to 15th in 2024; suicide moved into the top 10. Drug overdose deaths fell 26 percent, with the biggest drop involving synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
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📲 Did I miss any good news? Share story ideas and feedback to bryan.walsh@vox.com. For additional thoughts, follow me on X and don't forget to check out the latest from Future Perfect.
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