I chatted with my Mom about polio and the vaccine this week. She remembers two things about when it came out. The first was how relieved her parents were. The second was that after they’d all been vaccinated, on the annual summer trek to visit family in Canada, her parents said it was safe to use the hotel swimming pool for the first time.
It was a short story years in the making.
Today’s Moment of Science… The polio vaccines.
Science builds on previous discoveries. Pretty sure even God started with ‘let there be light’ before he got to the light-up dildo. So naturally, it took decades of work- and failures- from other scientists before Salk and Sabin could begin to conjure vaccines into existence.
There were some disasters, a few near misses, and at least one triumph you likely never heard about.
In 1931, researchers found that monkeys who survived polio already could catch and be paralyzed by another strain. Infection from one strain didn’t confer immunity to the others. Three strains in total were discovered by the time Salk was working on the vaccine in the late 1940s, and he still had to double check that there weren’t more little douchebag enterovirus cousins out there.
Dr. John Kolmer presented the results from his live virus vaccine at a conference in 1935. His trials on 10,000 children included no control group. The children who got polio were somehow in areas where there had been no outbreak. Hmm. Five children died, ten were left paralyzed, and Kolmer’s explanation? “It would have been worse had I not been there injecting them with polio uh I mean my totally functional polio vaccine.” One colleague called him a murderer.
Dr. Maurice Brodie presented his vaccine trial results at the same conference. Though his results were less death-y, they weren’t statistically significant, and people weren’t in the fucking mood after Kolmer’s bullshit. It might have succeeded with more research, but Brodie met an untimely death from a heart attack just a few years later at the age of 35.
It took until 1948 before scientists sorted out a way to grow poliovirus in vitro in large enough quantities to be more functionally used in researching a vaccine. That alone was such a breakthrough that researchers John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robins were awarded the Nobel prize in medicine in 1954 for the discovery. Their process would be instrumental in making what would come to be known as the first working vaccine.
Then there’s the story of Hilary Koprowski who made a polio vaccine that really worked.
It was in trials before Salk’s and worked so goddamn well it actually got approved on four continents. When he announced his results at a conference in 1951 though, people were aghast that he’d injected a live virus vaccine into children. With memories of Kolmer’s folly fresh in his mind all those years later, Sabin himself reportedly yelled “why did you do it? Why?”
Sabin got the strains of polio that he would use in his own live vaccine from Koprowski. So.
Salk went straight from med school into research, always having planned to do so. He got a gig in virology research and much to his and the world’s benefit, it worked out pretty goddamn well. The March of Dimes provided a handsome amount of funding. He grew the virus in monkey kidney cells, knocked them dead with formaldehyde, and scrubbed that mixture to inject back into the monkeys. They, fortunately, developed antibodies and not polio.
On April 12, 1955, it was announced that their trial during the previous polio season had been a success.
Sabin’s research continued, as he thought the live virus would produce a better vaccine. In order to make a live attenuated vaccine that was safe, he worked with mutant strains of the virus that had not been shown to be infectious but did confer immunity. Three individual oral polio vaccines (OPV) for wild polioviruses types 1, 2, and 3 were out by 1962, and the trivalent OPV with all three was available in 1964.
Multiple vaccines became available worldwide, polio hasn’t been a problem in forever, end of story.
…right?
There were 22 reported cases of polio in 2017.
There were over 1,225 last year.
This has been the third of a four part story on polio, reminding you that “eradicated” has a strict definition.
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