America once feared polio nearly as much as nuclear war. Then came the vaccine.

USA Today

12-04-2025

America once feared polio nearly as much as nuclear war. Then came the vaccine. | Opinion Together, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths and saved millions of children from paralysis.
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COVID-19 vaccine skepticism familiar to polio vaccine developer's son
Dr. Peter Salk was one of the first children to receive his dad's polio vaccine in 1953. Here's what he thinks could happen with the COVID-19 vaccines.
Staff video, USA TODAY
With rising measles outbreaks and what Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says about vaccines making daily headlines, it is timely to recognize that April 12 is the 70th anniversary of the most anticipated medical moment of the 20th century ‒ the polio vaccine.
For decades, polio had terrified parents and transfixed the nation. Each summer, polio outbreaks forced closures of swimming pools and movie theaters. A 1916 epidemic caused 27,000 cases of paralysis and 6,000 deaths. A 1950s survey showed that Americans feared polio more than any other calamity except nuclear war.
In 1947, a 33-year-old researcher named Jonas Salk became the director of a new virology lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Salk believed a killed-virus vaccine was the best approach to combat polio. Most other virologists disagreed with him. They favored a weakened live-virus vaccine that was predicted to be more effective and long-lasting.
A contest between these two opposing vaccine strategies would soon emerge from the setting of stuffy, academic conferences into public view. Below the surface, it was a rivalry between two brilliant men, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.
'Like being kicked in the teeth'
Sabin was the more experienced researcher. Eight years older than Salk, he was the head of pediatric research at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio. At conferences, Sabin failed to veil his dim view of Salk as an overly ambitious, excessively striving neophyte. In one telling episode in 1948, Sabin humiliated Salk at a conference by responding to one of Salk's questions with: 'Now, Dr. Salk, you should know better than to ask a question like that.'
Salk recalled the interaction was 'like being kicked in the teeth.'
Whereas Salk argued a killed-virus vaccine would be safer and easier to make, Sabin believed a live-virus vaccine would be superior in the long run. He felt that there was still much to learn about the poliovirus, and that the science could not be rushed.
Against the prevailing advice of his peers, Salk forged ahead with plans to develop a killed-virus vaccine. He neutralized cultures of the virus by immersing them in formaldehyde. It was a delicate balance. Too high a concentration of formaldehyde might diminish the vaccine's ability to produce an immune response against the disease. But too little might inadequately kill the virus and leave an unsafe, live vaccine that could actually cause polio ‒ a horrendous thought.
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When Salk grew confident enough in his vaccine to test it on humans, he and his lab team first tried it on themselves. Salk also inoculated his wife and children.
He then obtained approval to solicit volunteers at two institutions, the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children and the Polk State School, established for 'feeble-minded' children. With consent from parents, testing began in 1952.
'When you inoculate children with a polio vaccine for the first time,' Salk later admitted in an interview, 'you don't sleep well for two or three months.'
'The vaccine works'
To his relief, the vaccine produced a significant, protective antibody response against poliovirus.
In January 1953, Salk reported his results at a conference of prominent virologists. His peers expressed surprise and incredulity, but the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis decided to embark on a national trial of Salk's vaccine.
It was a momentous decision. An experimental vaccine previously tested in only a couple hundred people would now be given to hundreds of thousands of children across America. The vaccine trial of 1954 was among the largest medical studies in history, conducted at 14,000 schools in 44 states and Canada.
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In the United States, more than 600,000 first, second and third graders received three shots, each a month apart, of either vaccine or placebo.
Not everyone supported the vaccine. Some parents refused to subject their children to an 'experimental' treatment. On April 4, 1954, radio celebrity Walter Winchell publicly derided the vaccine in a monologue that included, 'Attention everyone! In a few moments I will report on a new polio vaccine ‒ it may be a killer!'
The study results were scheduled to be announced on April 12, 1955, at the University of Michigan. The nation held its breath. The first three words of the press release were, 'The vaccine works.' It was safe and 80-90% effective.
This news was immediately broadcast across the nation and around the world. A generation of Americans would remember what they were doing the moment they heard the news.
Jonas Salk became the most famous doctor on earth. He would never earn a dime from the vaccine he pioneered.
Albert Sabin later developed a live, attenuated-virus vaccine that could be given orally and in only one dose. In 1961, Sabin's oral vaccine supplanted Salk's shots nationwide. Later, in 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention switched the recommended vaccine back to the Salk version, hoping this might help eradicate polio worldwide.
The rivalry between Salk and Sabin ultimately served to benefit mankind. Because of them, American summers ceased to be shrouded by pervasive fear. Together, they prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths and saved millions of children from paralysis.
Seven decades later, vaccines remain our best weapon against viral disease and one of medicine's greatest gifts to humanity.
Dr. Andrew Lam is a retina surgeon and an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is author of 'The Masters of Medicine: Our Greatest Triumphs in the Race to Cure Humanity's Deadliest Diseases.'