Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases by Paul A. Offit

Author:Paul A. Offit
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

AS FAR AS HE KNEW, HILLEMAN HAD SUCCESSFULLY PURIFIED HEPATITIS B surface protein from the blood of homosexual men and drug users infected with the virus. Confident that he had his vaccine, he eventually persuaded Saul Krugman, Krugman’s wife Sylvia, and nine Merck executives to take it. Krugman supervised the experiment. “I had the nurse give me the first injection,” recalled Krugman. “Then I gave everybody else theirs.” For the next six months a physician examined each of the volunteers and periodically checked their blood to make sure that they didn’t have hepatitis. When the experiment was over, all slowly exhaled.

To test his hepatitis vaccine in more people, Hilleman needed someone whose reputation was unassailable. He chose Wolf Szmuness.

Small, fifty years old, with a pockmarked face and a startling shock of blond hair, Szmuness first came to the United States in 1969. Born in Warsaw, Poland, Szmuness lost his parents in the Holocaust and later fled to Russia ahead of an advancing German army. For twenty years he practiced medicine in Siberia and Russia. One event changed the direction of his career: his wife, Maya, almost died of hepatitis following a blood transfusion. Szmuness spent the rest of his life trying to understand the disease and its causes. In 1959 he returned to the small bustling city of Lublin on Poland’s eastern border. But eight years later, in 1967, Szmuness again faced anti-Semitism. During the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, government officials ordered Szmuness to protest Israel’s actions at a rally. He refused and was fired the next day.

Szmuness gradually worked his way up from lecturer to professor at Columbia’s School of Public Health. By 1973 he was directing hepatitis testing for the gay community at the New York Blood Center. An epidemiologist, clinician, public health official, and hepatitis virus researcher, Szmuness was the perfect choice to direct Hilleman’s vaccine trial. He quickly recruited a thousand homosexual men who had never been infected with hepatitis B virus. By October 1979 Szmuness had injected half of them with three doses of hepatitis vaccine and half with placebo. In June 1980, almost two years after the trial started, Szmuness and his colleagues carefully analyzed the results. Men who got the vaccine were 75 percent less likely to get hepatitis than were men who didn’t get the vaccine. Hilleman’s hepatitis B vaccine worked.

This controversial trial would later cause some to blame Hilleman for the AIDS epidemic in America. Although it was clear that AIDS had entered the United States well before Hilleman’s hepatitis B vaccine trials, Alan Cantwell Jr., a dermatologist, said in his 1988 book AIDS and the Doctors of Death, “To my surprise, I quickly discovered that much of the scientific knowledge that has accumulated on the spread of AIDS in America has come from the surveillance and blood testing of large groups of gay and bisexual men who volunteered as human test subjects in the original hepatitis B vaccine trials, which took place in six American cities during the years 1978–1981.

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