On April 26, 1954, the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the now-standard double-blind method, whereby neither the patient nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo.
On year later, on April 12, 1955, researchers announced the vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America. In the ensuing decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out the highly contagious disease in the Western Hemisphere.
Polio, known officially as poliomyelitis, is an infectious disease that has existed since ancient times and is caused by a virus. It occurs most commonly in children and can result in paralysis. The disease reached epidemic proportions throughout the first half of the 20th century. During the 1940s and 1950s, polio was associated with the iron lung, a large metal tank designed to help polio victims suffering from respiratory paralysis breathe.
President Franklin Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio in 1921 at the age of 39 and was left paralyzed from the waist down and forced to use leg braces and a wheelchair for the rest of his life. In 1938, Roosevelt helped found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later renamed the March of Dimes. The organization was responsible for funding much of the research concerning the disease, including the Salk vaccine trials.
The man behind the original vaccine was New York-born physician and epidemiologist Jonas Salk (1914-95). Salk’s work on an anti-influenza vaccine in the 1940s, while at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, led him, in 1952 at the University of Pittsburgh, to develop the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), based on a killed-virus strain of the disease. The 1954 field trials that followed, the largest in U.S. history at the time, were led by Salk’s former University of Michigan colleague, Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr.
In the late 1950s, Polish-born physician and virologist Albert Sabin (1906-1993) tested an oral polio vaccine (OPV) he had created from a weakened live virus. The vaccine, easier to administer and cheaper to produce than Salk’s, became available for use in America in the early 1960s and eventually replaced Salk’s as the vaccine of choice in most countries.
Today, polio has been eliminated throughout much of the world due to the vaccine; however, there is still no cure for the disease and it persists in a small number of countries in Africa and Asia.
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I’m old enough to remember the annual polio epidemics. It seemed that every school had a student who had survived polio and walked with braces. A girl who lived next door was the last polio victim in my life. that was in 1953 or 1954. She ended up walking with a limp but lived a productive life and survives to this day. The Sabin vaccine was regarded as a miracle sent by God by the people who lived through polio. Most people younger than me don’t even think about polio.
My mother refused to allow me to participate in the trial, insisting on waiting until it was certain there was no real danger. One of my first wife’s aunts was in Paris studying (1953, I think), caught polio and by the time her parents got there, she had died. It was a real scourge, was polio. I remember the day I and other schoolkids (second grade) were vaccinated: we were each given a Tootsie Roll for toughing it out. Didn’t hurt at all, nothing like a tetanus shot. The tetanus shot, of course, was a walk in the park compared with rabies shots, or so I was told by a kid who’d had them. No regrets about missing that experience.
I will not accept any vaccinations at this point (73) barring extreme duress. I’m a tad long in the tooth to head up into the sierra until my troops take the cities and sanity is restored, but if there’s a tracker in the mandated vaccine, well, my group’s newspaper will be called Grandpa and I’ll grow a beard longer than Fidel’s.
As far as I know, the double blind method is NOT always used to test vaccines. There are several reasons, ethics – no intentional infection of probands, lack of the situation of an “outbreak” with could show the vaccine works. They use to measure the immune response instead. To make the vaccine pass, they use the “booster” ingredients, to get the response, witch is a questionable indicator.
Vaccines are like sausages, if you want to like them, you don’t want to know how they are made.