U.S. regulators fast-tracked the Salk vaccine in 1954, deliberating for just two hours before approving it for wide-scale use. Despite Salk’s belief that a “killed-virus” vaccine “could not accidentally cause polio in those inoculated,” the number of reported polio cases rose immediately and dramatically within a year, with particularly steep increases in some states—including a 642% spike in Massachusetts.
According to one account, National Institutes of Health doctors and scientists were “well aware that the Salk vaccine was causing polio,” and some health departments even banned it. To make matters worse, in a “massive and highly publicised disaster,” over 200,000 unsuspecting children received a batch of polio vaccine later determined to be defective—manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, the batch contained improperly inactivated (and, therefore, live) polio virus that gave polio to at least 40,000 children.
In the early 1960s, the “cheaper to make, easier to take” live-virus OPV began to supplant the IPV as the polio vaccine of choice and remained in place for nearly 40 years. By then, scientists had been testing the OPV on American children for about a decade; as reported by Koprowski in a 2006 paper, U.S. testing of his oral vaccine took place from 1951-1962. Sabin tested his OPV on millions of Soviet citizens in 1959, immediately followed by U.S. trials. By the summer of 1960, Sabin’s OPV was on the cusp of licensing.
Knowing that children gravitate toward sugar, U.S. health department personnel who administered the oral polio vaccine “helped the medicine go down” by delivering the vaccine serum on sugar cubes. By 1962, “children were lining up at school, tongues out to receive pink-stained lumps of sugar impregnated with Albert Sabin’s live, attenuated oral polio vaccine.”
What officials neglected to tell the millions of American children who happily crunched on their sugar cubes was that the OPV, like the IPV, could give them full-blown, iron-lung-type polio. Nor were recipients of either type of polio vaccine informed of their exposure to the cancer-causing viral contaminant SV40, derived from the monkey kidneys used to produce the vaccines. When some vaccine recipients went on to develop polio or cancer (or both), all too often they met with an evasive and uncaring response from public health authorities who refused to admit that their vaccines could cause lifelong damage....read more>>>...
