polio vaccine history :: Article CreatorOral Vaccine Conquered Polio In 1960sOnly In Oklahoma
Hillcrest student nurse Ruth Lindquist helps pharmacist Tom Mullen drip the oral polio vaccine onto sugar cubes during Tulsas "Smash Polio" campaign in January 1963. Each person taking the vaccine was asked to donate 25 cents toward the cost of the project. This photo ran in the Tulsa World on Jan. 17, 1963.
Tulsa World Archive
A dreaded disease that left its victims disabled — such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt — or dead was finally conquered in the 1960s.
By a sugar cube and by more than 2,000 Tulsa volunteers, including doctors and nurses, pharmacists, Boy Scouts, Kiwanians, school principals, custodians, other employees and Civil Defense patrolmen who staffed 40 clinics in schools and at the Armory.
And thanks to that effort and other similar clinics around the country, most people under 50 today have no knowledge of polio and its crippling effects. Of course, the sugar didn't have any medicinal quality — the liquid vaccine was dripped onto the cubes to make the medicine go down, especially for children, the primary targets for the vaccine.
The oral vaccine was developed by Dr. Albert Sabin, a University of Cincinnati scientist. Its use followed by about 10 years an injected polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk that had cut the incidence of polio dramatically throughout the country, including Oklahoma.
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During the 1950s, for instance, there were 651 cases in five years in Tulsa. By 1962, that number had been cut to 10 cases, reflecting the effectiveness of the injected Salk vaccine. The liquid Sabin vaccine promised even greater protection.
Doctors stressed that even people who had received Salk vaccinations should get the oral medicine because the injected vaccine was only 85 percent to 90 percent effective while tests had shown the oral vaccine to be 100 percent effective.
More than 780,000 doses of the Sabin vaccine were distributed to 70 percent of the county's population by the Tulsa County Medical Society, which still looks at that community effort as one of the most successful projects of the now-100-year-old organization.
Records show that 265,710 received the first dose of type I on Jan. 20 and 27, more than 257,000 received the second dose of type II on March 10 and 17 and 253,064 doses of type III were given April 28 and May 5, according to Paul Patton, executive director of the Tulsa County Medical Society.
The Tulsa World helped draw attention to the second immunization on March 10, 1963, with a Page 1 drawing of a syringe dripping a liquid onto a sugar cube and a message overprinted in red: "Get your Type II oral polio vaccine TODAY!"
Because of the overprinted red message, there was no doubt about the importance of the small story at the bottom announcing that the second of three doses of the Sabin polio vaccine was scheduled to be given at 43 locations around Tulsa County that day. Each recipient was asked to contribute 25 cents for receiving the vaccine.
However, the World made it clear that no one would be turned away, regardless of a person's ability to pay. The story stressed the importance of taking all three doses of Sabin vaccine about six or eight weeks apart. The oral vaccine was believed to confer a lifetime immunity to the disease.
In spite of the big red message on the front page of that day's Tulsa World, only 162,615 showed up at the clinics for the second doses of vaccine. Rain and sickness — many children were out of school with flu, chicken pox and other illnesses — were blamed for the low turnout, and a makeup clinic was scheduled for the next Sunday, when 95,339 more turned out.
It had been only a few years since two of Tulsa's major hospitals, Hillcrest and St. John, created polio wards by moving iron lungs into hallways for victims because they didn't have enough patient rooms. During the height of the epidemic in the 1940s and '50s, parents kept their children out of swimming pools in the summer and would not allow them to attend movies or other events where they might be in crowds for fear they would contract the virus.
During the epidemic's worst days, the World ran Page 1 boxes showing how many new cases had been diagnosed, how many had died and how many had gone home from the hospitals.
A polio epidemic in 1916 had killed 6,000 and paralyzed 27,000 in the U.S. In 1921, Roosevelt, who had been the Democrat nominee for vice president the previous year, contracted the virus while on vacation. At first he walked with the aid of canes and heavy steel braces on his legs but eventually relied on a wheelchair for mobility.
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The End Of Polio Is In Sight. What Have We Learned?
The fight to eradicate polio has been long and difficult. It's been nearly 50 years since vaccines eliminated the disease in the United States. But polio continues to this day disabling or killing children in some harder to reach parts of the world. The good news is that we are now on the cusp of eradicating this terrible disease everywhere and forever.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is a consortium of major players in the fight — the Gates Foundation, Rotary International, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The group has the ambitious aim to end transmission of the virus that causes the disease, wild poliovirus, by the end of the year in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the two countries where it is still actively infecting humans. If the initiative succeeds, it will be the culmination of a campaign that has reduced the incidence of paralytic wild poliovirus from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to just 12 known cases last year.
It will also be a result of what may seem like a counterintuitive strategy: Knowledge about the disease flows not just from medical experts in great research centers to people in developing nations, but the other way as well, with workers on the front lines providing crucial information to stop the disease in their own areas and beyond. The lesson here: The medical tools needed to detect and contain any disease work best in the hands of the people most directly affected by it. Having used this strategy to stop polio, people in developing nations are already looking to apply those same tools against other diseases, both familiar and emerging.
Along the remote, mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the people on the front lines of the polio eradication effort are mostly women, and mostly members of the communities they serve. Each team is responsible for up to 75 houses, going door to door (or sometimes mosque to mosque), providing a dose of oral polio vaccine to every child in every five-day campaign. Because the communities are poor, and because families can lose patience with repeated visits focused only on polio, the workers also bring nutritional supplements, health information and other resources. Their job is to build trust in villages where people are prone to distrust, and to keep parents engaged in the fight. (In 2011, the fake vaccination campaign reportedly staged by the Central Intelligence Agency in its hunt for Osama bin Laden served only to deepen that distrust.)
The intensity of the national programs — with about 400,000 workers in Pakistan and 86,000 in Afghanistan — has recently reduced 12 genetic clusters of the wild poliovirus in the region to just two, and one of the two hasn't been seen since November. "From a medical perspective, the virus is gasping in these last corridors," says Dr. Ananda Bandyopadhyay of the Gates Foundation.
The virus could, of course, spread outside these regions, as it did in 2022, when international air travel carried polio to a handful of other countries, including the United States. But frontline workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan serve as a network for tracking its possible escape routes, as families move back and forth across the border.
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Misinformed Anti-vaxxers Risk A Return Of Once-beaten Diseases
There is no major crisis yet, but California and the rest of America are currently under unquestionable threat of a variety of epidemics, some of which could be crippling or fatal.
Make no mistake: This is the work of anti-vaccination activists led by current independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was working to discredit vaccinations long before the COVID-19 pandemic, even as he denied being an anti-vaxxer.
RFK Jr., milking his assassinated father's name and reputation for all he's worth, maintained in a Congressional hearing that "I have never been anti-vaxx. I have never told the public to avoid vaccination." But just last July, he also said, "There is no vaccine that is safe and effective."
Hey Junior, ever heard of the Sabin polio vaccine? Thanks to that one, there were no – zero – cases of the crippling polio virus detected in this country between 1979 and 2013, a 34-year period unprecedented in world history. No such thing as a safe and effective vaccine?
Since that lone 2013 case, which might have been transmitted by a foreign traveler to one of the rare individuals in America who never got the Sabin vaccine, there have been no more. But in 2022, traces of wild polio virus were found in wastewater in three New York counties.
There is similar, if not quite as absolute, effectiveness from the other vaccines required for admission to California public schools: vaccines against measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough), in addition to three doses of polio vaccine.
Measles causes fever, rash, coughs, runny nose, and red, watery eyes. Complications can include ear infections, coughs, brain damage and even death. Consequences of diphtheria include difficulty breathing, heart rhythm problems and occasionally death. Besides its trademark of a whooping cough, pertussis can cause nervousness, dry mouth and nausea, among other symptoms.
Each of these is highly contagious, with vaccination the only certain defense against them for those exposed to infected persons.
Vaccinations against these diseases were not required by public schools merely on some whim. The requirement came only after vaccines were long proven safe and effective.
It's true COVID vaccines were not as thoroughly proven as the others, but there is no question those vaccines are the main reason hospital case loads dropped radically after vaccinations began, to the point there are few places that now require masking.
None of this stopped Kennedy and his Children's Health Defense group from trying to convince parents to obtain medical exemptions from almost all vaccines for their children, many by using the few doctors willing to certify some children as having health risks if they are vaccinated.
It's also true the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) admits that COVID vaccines created a minor incidence of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the heart's lining), almost wholly among adolescents and young adults. These cases number less than 100 in several years of COVID vaccination, making the odds minimal for any individual to have lasting ill effects from COVID vaccines.
But listen to Kennedy and you'd think the cases number in the millions. His well-publicized, but inexpert (he's not a physician, not even a renegade one) rhetoric is one reason why even as a few thousand measles cases popped up around California and elsewhere last winter, pediatricians reported a sharp increase in the number of parents with fears about getting their kids vaccinated. One very dangerous side effect of all this has been that hearing exaggerations about the relatively few problems with COVID vaccines also spurred fears of other vaccines.
This fear causes some parents to keep their kids out of schools where vaccination is required unless parents can produce a medical excuse. Along with the problems inflicted by online schooling, it is a large reason for the recent increase in home schooling.
Milking the very fears he has helped stoke is Kennedy, who might affect this fall's presidential election, even though it's very uncertain which of the major candidates might be most impacted.
The upshot is that there is now a threat of epidemics of diseases long considered all but extinct. If they arise, anti-vaxxers and their vastly exaggerated concerns will be at fault.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.Com.
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