The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis by Paul A. Offit

Author:Paul A. Offit
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780300130379
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-06-14T10:37:12+00:00

Jonas Salk knew that his vaccine was better. In the late 1970s in a letter to Alexander Langmuir, Salk pleaded for the government to switch back to his vaccine. He argued that not one case of paralysis caused by a polio vaccine “should be regarded as acceptable if avoidable.” Eighteen years passed before the United States switched back to Jonas Salk’s vaccine; during that time another two hundred people were paralyzed by Sabin’s vaccine. On October 20, 1998, the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices—the principal body that advises the federal government about vaccine use—recommended to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that children use Salk’s vaccine exclusively. Sabin’s polio vaccine is no longer available in the United States.

Jonas Salk died on June 23, 1995, three years before the United States considered his vaccine to be the last, best vaccine to prevent polio. On the world’s stage, Salk was a respected figure. In a survey conducted in 1958, Salk was regarded as one of the two best-known living American scientists; Robert Oppenheimer, the developer of the atomic bomb, was the other. But many of his colleagues dismissed Salk as a lightweight or a fake. No one was more critical, more mean spirited, or more persistent in his attacks than Albert Sabin. A member of the debate team in college, Sabin routinely and consistently humiliated Salk in public.

In 1948, after John Enders figured out how to grow polio virus in monkey cells, an article appeared in a publication by the National Foundation claiming that large quantities of formaldehyde-killed polio virus might soon be available to protect children against polio. Albert Sabin took exception to this article and wrote a letter to Basil O’Connor: “Even if the need for large quantities of virus could be met,” said Sabin, “there is no valid reason for believing at this time that ‘killed virus’ vaccines can be of any practical value.” Sabin’s campaign to discredit the formaldehyde-inactivated polio vaccine, and later to discredit Jonas Salk, had begun.

In 1953, after Salk presented his studies of children at the Watson and Polk facilities—studies that caused the media to express hope that an inactivated polio vaccine might work—Sabin, addressing a scientific meeting in New York City, said, “Since there is an impression that a practicable vaccine for poliomyelitis is either at hand or immediately around the corner, it may be best to start this discussion with the statement that such a vaccine is not now at hand and that one can only guess as to whether it is around the corner.” Later that year, in front of a congressional committee, Sabin again opposed the growing acceptance of Salk and his vaccine: “I, for one, would strongly oppose large-scale tests of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of children based on the work of any one investigator.” In 1954, after Salk presented more data showing that his vaccine worked and after Life magazine published a story detailing Salk’s achievements, Sabin stood in front of scientists at the Michigan

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