How the Polio Vaccine Paralyzed Hundreds of Children, Eroding Public Trust in Government Health Policy
One of the greatest scientists in American history is Dr. Jonas Salk, known today for establishing the prestigious Salk Institute in San Diego, California, and for discovering the polio vaccine. Dr. Salk is one of the few scientists ever to be put on the cover of Time Magazine, along with the likes of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer for his development of the atomic bomb. Unlike Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist whose famous creation was meant to take lives, Dr. Salk's expertise was that of a medical doctor with a lifetime of focus on virology. His discoveries would save millions of lives, and choosing never to patent his technology, he wouldn't make a cent off it. When asked who owned the patent, he famously responded, "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Today it's estimated that his vaccine would be worth around 7 billion dollars.
Tragically, in the hands of a faulty pharmaceutical company, Salk's discovery was turned into something genuinely evil, causing the unnecessary infection of 40,000 people, paralyzing 200 children, and killing 10 innocents. This is the story of that tragedy and its repercussions.
Jonas Edward Salk was born on October 28th, 1914 to 2 Jewish parents in New York City. His parents, who had no formal education, would move Salk and his brothers all around New York looking for work. Throughout his childhood, he lived in East Harlem, the Bronx, and Queens.
At 13 years old, Salk attended the highly competitive Townsend Harris High School for intellectually gifted students, eventually attending the NYU School of Medicine. At some point during his education, Salk would conclude that he didn't enjoy practicing conventional medicine and treating one patient at a time. Rather, he would choose to pursue a career in research, hoping to positively affect the lives of hundreds of thousands.
Salk landed his first research position in 1941 as a post-doc under Dr. Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan. Francis had only recently joined the faculty having finished a stent of work with the Rockefeller Foundation where he famously discovered the type B influenza virus. This was Salk's first introduction to the world of virology, and he was immediately hooked.
Later in 1947, Salk would be granted his own lab at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, though he would find himself restricted by university rules and unimpressed with the size of his lab. The very next year in 1948, Salk was contacted by Harry Weaver, Director of Research at the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis, where he was asked to help discover new types of polio. Over time, Salk would build a team of researchers around him and receive multiple grants in the field of virology. He would eventually join the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis himself, later known as the March of Dimes Foundation established by FDR in 1938.
In the mid-20th century, polio was the most feared disease known to mankind. According to a national poll at the time, Americans only feared one thing more than polio, Oppenheimer's atomic bomb. Regardless of your wealth and status, polio could affect you or your family at any time. During the summer of 1921 in the Bay of Fundy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States who would famously be elected to serve 4 terms, was sailing on his yacht when he accidentally fell overboard. Complaining of lower back pain from the incident, he would try swimming in hopes of easing the pain and soreness. Three days later, he could no longer walk. On August 25th, 1921, FDR was diagnosed with infantile paralysis (polio), which had no cure. Seventeen years later, FDR would establish the March of Dimes Foundation which eventually funded Salk's polio research in 1949.
Salk buried himself in his research. Unlike other virologists, he chose to pursue an inactivated version of the polio vaccine, meaning he hoped to inoculate patients with a dead virus rather than a live virus. This was in direct opposition to the work done by Dr. Albert Sabin who would go on to discover a live polio vaccine that was taken orally with a sugar cube.
After successful results were seen in animals, on July 2nd, 1952, Salk would test his inactivated vaccine in 43 children at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children. Weeks later, he would test his vaccine on children at the Polk State School for the Retarded and Feeble-minded. Eventually, in 1953, he would test the vaccine in his own wife and children.
In 1954, he tested his vaccine on millions of children, known at the time as "Polio Pioneers". On April 12th, 1955, Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was announced as safe and effective, an achievement made possible by the March of Dimes Foundation which had over 100 million financial contributors and 7 million volunteers nationwide.
Fresh off of this amazing victory, tragedy would strike the country. Just days later in April 1955, over 200,000 children in the United States received a version of Salk's polio vaccine that was produced by a company called Cutter Laboratories. Cutter was one of 6 pharmaceutical companies given licensure by the US government to produce the inactivated vaccine. But unlike the other companies, Cutter was not successful in actually killing the polio virus inside their vaccines. This led to the rapid distribution of a live vaccine instead of an inactivated one.
Within days of vaccination, there were waves of reported cases of paralysis and death in the vaccinated children. Later investigations would conclude that 40,000 people contracted polio from the vaccine, something now known as vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV). As if this weren't bad enough, 200 of those children would be paralyzed, and 10 would die. The government would withdraw the Cutter version of the vaccine on April 27th, 1955, but the damage had already been done. In reaction to this tragedy, Salk would be quoted as saying, "That was the first and only time in my life that I felt like dying. There was no hope."
Ultimately, the vaccine was an incredible success. In 1957, 2 years after the Cutter vaccine was removed, there were 58,000 cases of polio in the US. Just 4 years later, there were only 161 cases. According to the WHO, polio would be completely eradicated from the Americas in 1994.
As a result of the Cutter incident, there was a rampant increase in federal regulation over vaccines. There was also a court ruling that held Cutter liable to the victims of their vaccines, forcing them to pay compensations. This type of litigation eventually led to the creation of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986. Seeing that companies like Cutter Laboratories would no longer be fiscally capable of producing vaccines due to their liability, this program was meant to protect vaccine manufacturers from litigation that would otherwise threaten the country's capacity to produce vaccines.
In recent years, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has been attacked by politicians like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the recent pick by President-elect Donald Trump to be the next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has a long history of environmental and public health protection efforts, though he has also come under scrutiny for his views on vaccines like MMR in the past. Kennedy disagrees with these protections and believes that companies should be held liable for harms caused by vaccines, similar to other medications.
On the other side of this argument are people like Dr. Paul Offit, Director of the Vaccine Education Center, who argues that the program is necessary in order to protect vaccine manufacturing. "The option of suing vaccine manufacturers should be stopped and that compensation should only be available through the official program." His view is that the country's capacity to create new vaccines and continue the production of current vaccines relies heavily on the program.
Regardless of your opinion, there's no denying that the Cutter incident and resulting protections for vaccine manufacturers have led to a populist movement and degradation of public trust in both pharmaceutical companies and the government agencies that regulate them. Such are the unforeseen repercussions of Salk's life-saving discovery which is still used around the world today.
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