On This Day: Polio vaccine found safe and effective. Now, polio returns with anti-vax movement. - Apr. 12, 1955

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Polio vaccine

The second polio virus vaccine was developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh, and announced to the world on 12 April 1955. The Salk vaccine, or inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), is based on poliovirus grown in a type of monkey kidney tissue culture (vero cell line), which is chemically inactivated with formalin. After two doses of inactivated poliovirus vaccine (given by injection), 90 percent or more of individuals develop protective antibody to all three serotypes of poliovirus, and at least 99 percent are immune to poliovirus following three doses.

Jonas Salk

The first effective polio vaccine was developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk and a team at the University of Pittsburgh that included Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and Lorraine Friedman, which required years of subsequent testing. Salk went on CBS radio to report a successful test on a small group of adults and children on 26 March 1953; two days later, the results were published in JAMA. Leone N. Farrell invented a key laboratory technique that enabled the mass production of the vaccine by a team she led in Toronto.

[Field trials]

Beginning 23 February 1954, the vaccine was tested at Arsenal Elementary School and the Watson Home for Children in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Salk's vaccine was then used in a test called the Francis Field Trial, led by Thomas Francis, the largest medical experiment in history at that time. The test began with about 4,000 children at Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia, and eventually involved 1.8 million children, in 44 states from Maine to California. By the conclusion of the study, roughly 440,000 received one or more injections of the vaccine, about 210,000 children received a placebo, consisting of harmless culture media, and 1.2 million children received no vaccination and served as a control group, who would then be observed to see if any contracted polio.

The results of the field trial were announced 12 April 1955 (the tenth anniversary of the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose paralytic illness was generally believed to have been caused by polio). The Salk vaccine had been 60–70% effective against PV1 (poliovirus type 1), over 90% effective against PV2 and PV3, and 94% effective against the development of bulbar polio. Soon after Salk's vaccine was licensed in 1955, children's vaccination campaigns were launched. In the U.S., following a mass immunization campaign promoted by the March of Dimes, the annual number of polio cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957. By 1961 only 161 cases were recorded in the United States.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

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Polio Is Making a Comeback. Thanks, Anti-Vaxxers!
If it seems like infectious diseases are coming at us faster, spreading more widely and persisting longer than they have in generations, it’s because they are, health experts say.
AUGUST 16, 2022

EARLIER THIS MONTH, poliovirus was discovered in wastewater in counties outside New York City late last month, signaling the first domestic outbreak since the 1970s of that potentially deadly and crippling virus.

Covid. Monkey Pox. Now polio. If it seems like infectious diseases are coming at us faster, spreading more widely and persisting longer than they have in generations—well, it’s because they are, health experts say, largely because one thing that we can do to reliably prevent an outbreak of infectious disease—get vaccinated—is the one thing millions of people in the United States and across the developed world are failing to do.

For the first time since the early 1990s, life-expectancy is actually dropping for many groups in the U.S. A fifth of Americans have refused the Covid vaccines for themselves or their children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And just 65 percent of residents of some counties outside New York City—Orange and Rockland Countries, for instance—are vaccinated for polio, compared to a nationwide average of 80 percent. It should come as no surprise that when polio reappeared in the United States last month—the first U.S. outbreak since 1979—the first diagnosed case was from Rockland.

We’re time-traveling, in a sense, returning to that dark time before vaccines. “The extent to which people are currently rejecting scientific findings, and expertise of all kinds, is scary,” said Mary Fissell, an historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
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https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/anti-vaxxers-virus-polio-comeback-1396772/

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Jonas Salk, the man who cured polio, "would be shocked" by anti-vaxxers, experts say
Many people once lined up joyously to receive vaccines. What changed?

Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that invades the nervous system and can trigger total paralysis in a matter of hours. It mainly targets children under age 5, and at one time disabled and killed thousands of American children every year. Today, all that is a distant memory. The World Health Organization recently estimated that, thanks to polio vaccines, "More than 20 million people are able to walk today who would otherwise have been paralyzed. An estimated 1.5 million childhood deaths have been prevented through the systematic administration of vitamin A during polio immunization activities."

That breakthrough was largely the work of Dr. Jonas Salk, the American virologist who developed one of the first polio vaccines. A year before Salk died in 1995, polio was considered eradicated in North and South America and today cases have decreased by 99% globally. There were just six cases reported in 2021.

At the same time, Salk was a prominent liberal who cared about public health and believed that quality medical care should be widely available. As his son, Dr. Peter Salk of the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health, told Salon, there are lessons from his life that clearly apply to present conditions. Salk had no desire to become rich from his work, his son said, a stark contrast to the current era when most new drugs are developed by pharmaceutical companies frequently accused of exploiting public health needs, predatory pricing, misleading marketing and deliberately stalling vaccine development to protect corporate profits.

Salk "would be shocked" by the rise of the contemporary anti-vaccine movement, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "He grew up at a time when diphtheria was a routine killer of teenagers and whooping cough would kill 8,000 to 10,000 people a year. Polio would paralyze 30,000 to 35,000 people a year and kill 1,500 people."
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https://www.salon.com/2023/11/01/jonas-salk-the-man-cured-polio-would-have-been-baffled-by-modern-anti-vaxxers-experts-say/

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Column: Trump and RFK Jr. want to make the world safe again for polio and measles. You should be terrified
By Michael Hiltzik
March 5, 2024

We’ve already seen that the embrace of pernicious anti-vaccination claptrap by unscrupulous politicians and government officials has had detectable impacts on public health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now reporting 41 cases of measles, for which a vaccine has been available since 1963, in 16 states.

"Polio hit without warning. There was no way of telling who would get it....It killed some of its victims and marked others for life, leaving behind vivid reminders for all to see: wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, breathing devices, deformed limbs."

— David Oshinsky, “Polio: An American Story”

Resistance or refusal of COVID vaccination, plainly due to anti-vaccine propaganda, has kept the vaccine rate alarmingly low.

In only one state, Minnesota, did the percentage of the population that has received the latest updated booster exceed 20% as of the end of last year. In Florida, the adult booster rate is an appalling 7.7%. (In California, it’s 14.2%, which isn’t something to be particularly proud about.)
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https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-03-05/trump-and-robert-f-kennedy-jr-measles-polio

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