Page 80 - Summer 2019 Journal

Today, it is anyone’s guess as to how many people contracted polio due to Salk’s original vaccine.
cases being very low.”7
Helping fuel the fire, the National Founda-
tion for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes) produced advertising campaigns that led ev- eryone to believe that polio was a rampant and violent crippler. Dr. Humphries points out that individuals were subjected to horrific treatments such as tendon cutting, surgical straightening and prolonged splinting; these rushed proce- dures were responsible for much of the residual paralysis, deformities and lingering stiffness that victims suffered.
SALK AND THE CUTTER INCIDENT
On March 26, 1953, American physician and microbiologist Jonas Salk announced on national radio that he had successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis. Presumably, the nation cheered. Because of the tremendous fear created by the advertising campaigns, parents in Canada, Finland and the United States read- ily offered up their children to serve as test subjects for Salk’s clinical vaccine trial in 1954. Over six hundred and twenty thousand “polio pioneers” were injected with vaccine or placebo, and “more than a million others participated as ‘observed’ controls,” in what would become the largest public health experiment in history.8 Licensing of Salk’s polio vaccine was then fast-tracked by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The government ap- proved the vaccine for commercial use after only two hours of deliberation, persuaded by the one-year field trial that the vaccine was both
“safe and effective.”9
Unfortunately, fast-tracking the vaccine
proved disastrous. In the spring of 1955, Salk’s newly approved inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, was administered to over four hundred thou- sand people, including many schoolchildren.10 Of those, over half—two hundred and twenty thousand individuals—in five Western and mid-Western states were injected with a bad batch. Because Salk’s vaccine used a “killed” version of the polio germ, it “supposedly carried no risk of giving recipients ‘vaccine-associated polio paralysis,’”11 but within days, reports of paralysis began surfacing. Within a month, the
mass vaccination program against polio had to be suspended.12 Salk’s vaccine had caused sev- enty thousand cases of muscle weakness, one hundred and sixty-four cases of severe paralysis and ten deaths. Three fourths (75 percent) of the victims remained paralyzed for the rest of their lives.13
This tragedy became known as the “Cut- ter incident.” Investigations confirmed that the formalin (or formaldehyde) used to kill the poliovirus did not do what it was supposed to do. Rather, the manufacturing process “resur- rected” the poliovirus, which led to injection of live polioviruses into recipients.14 Moreover, the vaccine formulation used during the 1954 field trial had contained Merthiolate, the trade name for the thimerosal mercury compound, which, while problematic in other respects, had a virus- killing effect. However, manufacturers removed the Merthiolate from the 1955 vaccine to induce a faster antibody response in vaccine recipients, causing the vaccine to retain live viruses of a highly neurovirulent nature.7
As a result of the Cutter incident, more people developed paralysis from the 1955 vac- cine than would have developed it from a wild, natural poliovirus. Moreover, children given the Cutter Laboratories vaccines were more likely to experience paralysis in their arms, suffer se- vere and permanent paralysis, require breathing assistance in iron lungs and die than children naturally infected with poliovirus.11
Cutter Laboratories ceased manufactur- ing Salk’s polio vaccine after the incident, but the American government reinitiated its vac- cination program only twenty-one days after the suspension, allowing other laboratories to continue supplying the eager public with Salk’s original vaccine. Wyeth Laboratories subse- quently produced another defective, crippling Salk vaccine.15 Today, it is anyone’s guess as to how many people contracted polio due to Salk’s original vaccine. Theoretically, tens of millions of doses of improperly inactivated Salk vaccines may have been sold and injected into children in the U.S. and in nearly one hundred other countries before that vaccine formulation was discontinued.
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Wise Traditions
SUMMER 2019