to produce a good vaccine and to distribute it. And if one is available sooner, I'd rather wait several rounds to make sure they've got it right. I'll wear a mask and socially distance before I let anyone inject me with a new vaccine, especially if the current regime is "over seeing" it.
Polio ravaged us for decades, the vaccine was a miracle, yet one lab that produced it had a problem, and ended up distributing active polio rather than the cure. Someone at NIH found the problem, but bad batches got out anyway. Our science is more advanced, so development will be quicker, but flaws can always happen during production, and bad batches could go out again.
Here's the title and excerpts from an article about the polio vaccine tragedy, chosen to show the time line of development, testing and distribution. Years. Link below.
The tainted polio vaccine that sickened and fatally paralyzed children in 1955
It was ‘one of the worst biological disasters in American history,’ one scholar wrote...
As scientists and politicians desperately search for medicines to slow the deadly coronavirus, and as President Trump touts a malaria drug as a remedy, a look back to the 1955 polio vaccine tragedy shows how hazardous such a search can be, especially under intense public pressure...
Roughly 40,000 got “abortive” polio, with fever, sore throat, headache, vomiting and muscle pain. Fifty-one were paralyzed, and five died, Offit wrote in his 2005 book, “The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis.”...
It was “one of the worst biological disasters in American history: a man-made polio epidemic,” Offit wrote.
In those days, polio, or infantile paralysis, was a terror.
“A national poll … found that polio was second only to the atomic bomb as the thing that Americans feared most,” Offit wrote.
“People weren’t sure how you got it,” he said in an interview last week. “Therefore, they were scared of everything. They didn’t want to buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store. It’s the same now. … Everybody’s walking around with gloves on, with masks on, scared to shake anybody’s hand.”
The worst polio outbreak in U.S. history struck in 1952, the year after Offit was born. It infected 57,000 people, paralyzed 21,000 and killed 3,145. The next year there were 35,000 infections, and 38,000 the year after that....
Often polio victims were children, but the most famous affected American was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who got polio and was paralyzed from the waist down in 1921 when he was 39.
In 1951, Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to find a vaccine. During intense months of research, he took live polio virus and killed it with formaldehyde until it was not infectious but still provided virus-fighting antibodies....
In 1953, Salk tested it on himself, his wife and three children.
On April 26, 1954, Randy Kerr, a 6-year-old second-grader from Falls Church, Va., stood in the cafeteria of the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean and became the first to be vaccinated in a massive field study....
A year later, on April 12, 1955, when officials announced the results at a news conference at the University of Michigan, there was jubilation. Reporters hollered: “It works! It works!” Offit wrote.
The news made front-page headlines across the country. “People wept,” Offit said. “There were parades in Jonas Salk’s honor. … That’s what contributed to the tragedy of Cutter more than anything else … the irony.”
That same day, licenses were hurriedly granted to several drug companies, including Cutter Laboratories, to make the vaccine.
But the officials granting the licenses were never told of Eddy’s findings, Offit wrote....
She began testing Cutter’s samples in August 1954 and continued through November, according to a later report in the Congressional Record. She found that three of the six samples paralyzed test monkeys...
Eddy’s discovery suggested that Cutter’s manufacturing process was flawed. Its vaccine should have contained only killed virus.
She reported her findings to William Workman, head of the NIH Laboratory of Biologics Control.
But amid the scientific and bureaucratic chaos, Workman never told the licensing committee, Offit wrote.
Starting on the evening of April 12, 1955, batches of the Salk vaccine made by five drug firms were shipped out in boxes marked “POLIO VACCINE: RUSH.”
About 165,000 doses of Cutter’s went out.
Within weeks, reports of mysterious polio infections started coming in....
Other cases followed....
Not only did some people injected with the tainted vaccine get sick, but some who got the vaccine went on to infect family members and neighbors....
“By April 30, within forty-eight hours of the recall,” Offit wrote. “Cutter’s vaccine had paralyzed or killed twenty-five children: fourteen in California, seven in Idaho, two in Washington, one in Illinois, and one in Colorado.”
On May 6, all polio vaccinations were postponed. They were resumed on May 15 after the government had rechecked the vaccines for safety. But people were still frightened....
Years later, in a suit brought against Cutter, ...
Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/
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