Eagerly awaiting large quantities of vaccine for a mass vaccination campaign, Foege and two CDC colleagues were then plunged into dealing with a sudden smallpox outbreak.
Because of a grant from Gates and his wife Melinda, the building that holds the cutting edge genetics research at the University of Washington is named after William Foege.
In December, 1966, Bill Foege was working as a consultant for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on smallpox eradication in a medical mission in a remote part of eastern Nigeria.