ON THIS DAY: February 23, 1954, Dr. Jonas Salk begins first mass polio vaccination in Pittsburgh - WPXI Pittsburgh
ON THIS DAY: February 23, 1954, Dr. Jonas Salk begins first mass polio vaccination in Pittsburgh - WPXI Pittsburgh |
- ON THIS DAY: February 23, 1954, Dr. Jonas Salk begins first mass polio vaccination in Pittsburgh - WPXI Pittsburgh
- Pandemic Parallels: Older adults remember polio vaccines - Lynchburg News and Advance
- The tragic story of a Canadian vaccine trailblazer - Maclean's
| Posted: 22 Feb 2021 09:18 PM PST  The clinical trials of the vaccine on 1.8 million schoolchildren, called "polio pioneers," that had begun in Pittsburgh in 1954, were completed by April 12, 1955, when the vaccine was announced as safe and effective. A nationwide inoculation campaign was immediately launched, though it was briefly suspended after more than 200,000 people were injected with a bad batch of the vaccine from a California lab. Thousands of polio cases were reported, 200 children were paralyzed and 10 died. Standards for manufacturing the vaccine were tightened and the campaign resumed.  |
| Pandemic Parallels: Older adults remember polio vaccines - Lynchburg News and Advance Posted: 22 Feb 2021 03:00 PM PST   HARRISONBURG, Va. (AP) — Like many kids his age, James Hartt as a teen in the '60s enjoyed passing the time with a bit of naive, reckless abandonment. One way Hartt found to amuse himself was leaping from a nearby bridge and sticking the landing on the other side, until one day, Hartt woke up unable to move his legs. Immediately, fear set in that it could be poliomyelitis — every parent's waking fear in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Fortunately, a doctor deduced Hartt's diagnosis was two sprained legs as a result of his airborne adventures, but many children around the world were not as fortunate. When it became available, Hartt got his vaccine. Nearly 70 years later, Hartt senses a stark parallel to the excitement he felt then as he prepares to receive his second COVID-19 vaccine this weekend. "If you look back, polio and this thing is almost the same type of thing," Hartt said. "Polio, they used iron lungs back then. Now they're using … those air things that they run out of all the time. The symptoms are very close. The way they treated it was very close." Poliomyelitis — better known as polio — is an infectious disease that most commonly affects children, causing paralysis. Summer of 1894, the U.S. experienced its first polio epidemic, but it wasn't until 1955 that Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was approved for nationwide inoculation. Shortly after, a second vaccine option was approved for manufacturing with easier admission at a cheaper cost by Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin in 1961. After cases peaked in 1952, with roughly 58,000 people diagnosed with polio in the U.S., the final case of wild-virus polio in the U.S. was reported in 1979. With a tight-fisted grip around the nation, polio impacted thousands of children annually into the late 1950s, mercilessly attacking the nervous system. It was typically identified by paralyzed limbs, most frequently the legs. By 1957, there were less than 6,000 cases, and it had dropped to 120 cases by 1964, thanks to vaccines. Today's pandemic of the novel coronavirus is harder to identify physically and largely plagues the lungs, which can lead to pneumonia, respiratory failure, septic shock or death, in severe cases. Now those same children who were most vulnerable to the polio epidemic are grown and at greater risk for severe illness from COVID-19, but the fastest vaccine ever created is steadily being distributed in phases following the authorization of Pfizer's vaccine on Dec. 12 and Moderna's version six days later. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two doses of Salk's polio vaccine are 90% effective or more and three doses boosts the effectiveness to 99-100%. Both Pfizer and Moderna report their vaccines show approximately 95% efficacy at preventing both mild and severe symptoms of COVID-19. "I believe in these shots, and I believe they're doing the best thing they can," Hartt said. According to the March of Dimes, the leading global agency fighting polio, up to 95% of people infected with polio were asymptomatic and less than 1% of infected persons experienced the virus attacking their nervous systems within the spine to result in partial or complete paralysis. Salem-based Rotarian William "Bill" Long is locally known as a polio expert. His father-in-law contracted polio in his youth, which stunted the growth of one leg. The connection inspired Long, who owns three iron lungs — a clunking beast of machinery that contracted lungs for those who could not breathe on their own — to allow the machinery to travel between Rotary clubs for educational purposes. Long said the demand for hospital care was overwhelming, much like today's limitation of ventilators, and Memorial and Crippled Children's Hospital in Roanoke was the primary care facility for sick children in the southern Valley. "A whole floor with nothing but iron lungs on it," he said. "Space between each iron lungs, just wide enough for people to get through to work." In the Jan. 25, 1946, edition of James Madison University's newspaper, The Breeze, W. L. Baldwin, state chairman for the polio fundraiser, is quoted as saying, "It is believed that over the last two-year period, Virginia has been hit harder by poliomyelitis than any other state in the nation." Following data reports Virginia's county and city goals that year were set more than 25% higher due to the cost of caring for over 1,100 polio victims over the span of 19 months. Infantile paralysis struck down children of every income bracket in 94 of the 100 counties of Virginia over the previous two years. According to the CDC, there are 27 million total cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and 486,466 total deaths, as of Wednesday. Belmont resident Nancy O'Hare is scheduled to receive her second vaccine by the end of February, and she vividly remembers the fear that haunted her days and nights mothering a 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter while polio raged on. "I remember when Salk developed the vaccine. I remember when my children, who are now in their 60s, got the vaccine. … It took them years to develop the one to defeat polio, so I'm thrilled we're able to do it so quickly now, develop this vaccine," O'Hare said. Back then, O'Hare remembers going to doctor's offices to receive the polio vaccine while children received sugar cubes topped with Sabin's oral vaccine from schools or pediatrician offices. "We did not go to hospital, we did not go to vaccination stations. … When it was released to be able to be consumed, it was fast. It was all over the country," she said. Verona native Donn Meyer said he can remember his parents taking him to Fort Defiance High School at a very young age to receive the polio vaccine on a sugar cube in the '60s. Back then, images of iron lungs were plastered on every screen, and harrowing stories of sick children written in papers. A nationwide vaccine campaign even featured Elvis Presley publicly receiving his vaccination. "We'd seen the pictures, we'd heard TV reports, we'd seen movies about it. And it was scary and that's why I think the world was so happy, or at least the United States was so happy, when the polio vaccine came out," O'Hare said. An archived Associated Press article published in Daily News-Record on Aug. 13, 1955, reported that Southern states pioneered public programs to distribute the Salk vaccine shots to schoolchildren and tentative survey results showed a 46% drop in polio deaths compared to the previous year. By the time of publication, 191 deaths were recorded, compared to 355 within the same time the previous year. While polio seems a thing of the past within the U.S., there is no cure for the disease and two countries remain endemic. Rotary International remains a leading agency in funding the end of polio, and members have contributed more than $2.1 billion to eliminate the paralyzing disease since 1979. With polio a shadow of a memory for most Americans today, those who endured the polio epidemic remember the clear parallels of quarantines, school closures and the dread. "Same things happened," Hartt said. "I think they've come across something that's going to work, and I think everyone should get it." For copyright information, check with the distributor of this item, Daily News-Record.  |
| The tragic story of a Canadian vaccine trailblazer - Maclean's Posted: 22 Feb 2021 12:08 PM PST He was called a "savant" and a "savior," thought a contender for a Nobel Prize and named alongside John Steinbeck as an American "genius whose work will live on through the centuries." But he wasn't American, he was Canadian, and by 1939—just four years after receiving international acclaim—his vaccine research was shuttered, he had been fired from a prestigious job at New York University and he was dead of a heart attack, though one former colleague called it a suicide. Dr. Maurice Brodie was only 36. Though little-known today, the story of the Ottawa-raised, McGill-educated researcher is a key one in the development of vaccine safety. It's also a tragic study of ambition and altruism in a time of epidemic. "He was the first to develop a polio vaccine that worked," says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "He did some things that were groundbreaking. It's just that the technology wasn't there" to mass-produce a reliable vaccine. Others were more critical. Brodie had a "slapdash way of working," wrote one scientist in 1935 after reviewing a paper documenting his vaccine trials. Brodie's paper was never published. In the 1930s, polio was coming to the fore of public consciousness. Outbreaks early in the decade created fears of a wider epidemic (which would hit Canada in 1937). U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, a polio survivor, brought new visibility to the disease and his annual "Birthday Balls" provided funding for polio treatment and vaccine research, including Brodie's. "It was the growing threat," says public-health historian Christopher Rutty, who teaches at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Vaccine science had recently bested diphtheria. "Polio was the outlier, it was the challenge, and it required investment."  Maurice Brodie, 1932 (Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine) After winning praise for his research with pediatrics pioneer Dr. Alton Goldbloom at McGill, Brodie was enticed to New York by FDR's money, which could help pay for the hundreds of rhesus monkeys needed for research (Brodie called them "martyrs to science"). In New York, under the supervision of Dr. William H. Park, a veteran health researcher savvy about promoting his work in the media, Brodie spent his days harvesting the monkeys' infected spinal cords in order to obtain enough virus material to produce a vaccine. His singular innovation was to successfully use a chemical agent called formalin to inactivate the virus and use it to make a shot that induced antibodies. Formalin had already been used to kill the diphtheria toxin and create what is called a toxoid vaccine. But diphtheria is caused by a bacterium, not a virus like polio. "It's not a simple application of what happened with toxoid to a polio vaccine, it's a whole different kind of thing," says Rutty. Brodie's method worked. "Definite immunity can be developed against the virus of poliomyelitis using virus rendered non-infective by formalin," he announced in the prestigious journal Science in June 1934. Throughout the following year newspapers breathlessly reported Brodie's animal findings, then his testing of the vaccine—on himself and his co-workers—and on a heroic errand of mercy flight to deliver 600 doses to quell an outbreak in Kern County, California. "Given only 24 hours notice, Dr. Maurice A. Brodie…cast his assistants into a frenzy of haste and today managed to answer death's challenge with his first 'load' of vaccine," a Hearst-owned wire service reported as the flight left Newark. Between November 1934 and May 1935, 1,654 children and health-care workers in the county received the shot. The relieved county health officer told the New York Times that "not one single person receiving it has developed poliomyelitis." Privately, he confessed in a letter to Dr. Park that Kern County was ill-equipped to run a proper vaccine study unless the National Institute of Health were to "send us trained persons to actually do the work of this part of the vaccination program." Brodie was cautious. The media cast him as a dashing young hero anyway. Canada had produced medical research phenoms before. In 1923 Frederick Banting, who co-discovered insulin, became the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Prize for Medicine (at 32). The research foundation named for him helped fund Brodie's early work in Montreal and the two were frequently compared. But unlike Banting, who had initially struggled as a mediocre student, everything about Brodie's young life signaled that he was a star. He was a track athlete, an amateur boxer, a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen and the recipient of the Wood Gold Medal for distinction at McGill. He even rescued a boy from drowning in the Rideau River. A man who loved genius and stardom—mostly his own—was scientist and author Paul de Kruif, and he was secretary to FDR's funding organization. He initially secured Brodie's grant then wrote rapturously about his progress in the press. "De Kruif was an enthusiast and if he got enthusiastic about your project, he would go all out to support it," says historian Daniel Wilson, author of Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors. In his enthusiasm, Wilson points out, de Kruif and others ignored prominent skeptics like virologist Thomas Rivers who believed that vaccine trials were premature. De Kruif also never recommended oversight for a lab stretched thin. When it was reported that Brodie had moved on to limited human trials the N.Y. Department of Health was overwhelmed with requests from mothers eager to have their children receive the unproven vaccine. In April 1935, Roosevelt was informed of a new Brodie trial in North Carolina, which, unlike the one in California, would be rigorously documented and investigated by federal health officials. Expectations—and pressure—were high as newspapers reported on Brodie's work and that of a rival: Temple University's John Kolmer. Both Brodie and Kolmer were to present their findings at a meeting of the American Public Health Association in Milwaukee that October. But that fall there were new questions about the efficacy and safety of Brodie's vaccine. Other labs were unable to replicate his findings in monkeys. Two children in California who received the vaccine in October acquired the disease (though it was unclear if they did so before the shot, because of it or because it didn't work). Of the 1,452 involved in the North Carolina trial (both those receiving the vaccine and those in the control group), not one developed polio, making it unclear if the vaccine had worked or if the participants simply hadn't been exposed to the virus. Many scientists began to privately circulate doubts about whether Brodie's formalin-inactivated vaccine worked. Worse, they expressed horror that Kolmer's ricinoleate-weakened virus vaccine might, in fact, be deadly. Five recipients of Kolmer's vaccine died of complications from polio. "I was asked to go out to Milwaukee and be the hatchetman," Thomas Rivers, the imperious skeptic, recalled in his memoir. He delivered a harsh assessment. When the APHA met again the following month in St. Louis, a federal health official named James Leake questioned Brodie's findings and called Kolmer a murderer. The incident was made public. Within the month New York City barred Brodie from continuing his research. He spent his last three years working as a pathologist in Detroit, where he died in 1939. De Kruif stepped aside at Roosevelt's philanthropic organization and was replaced by Rivers, who set about funding more basic projects, including the Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough of culturing polio in the lab—a step necessary for producing a workable vaccine suggested years earlier by Brodie's mentor, Alton Goldbloom. Brodie's work provided a cautionary tale of how not to run a vaccine trial. The lack of rigorous documentation for the California study left its results open to criticism and, when lumped together with Kolmer's inept and dangerous work, made future trials seem irresponsible. But as Paul Offit points out, Brodie's work also provided invaluable lessons about working with formalin-inactivated virus—lessons Jonas Salk would use to develop his successful polio vaccine in the 1950s. It was a medical triumph Brodie never lived to see. "The first thing one notices about Dr. Brodie is the pleasantness of his greeting—to strangers and staff alike," the Toronto Star wrote after a visit to Brodie's busy lab in November 1934. It also noted his athleticism and drive. "Dr. Brodie's physical characteristics leave one with the impression that here is an energetic, indomitable young fellow, ready to follow the path of his burning desire to achieve." Four-and-a-half years later he was dead of a heart attack. Offit, who co-invented the rotavirus vaccine, isn't surprised that there were rumours of suicide, or as writer Greer Williams suggested, that Brodie "died of a broken heart." For a researcher, the thought that any vaccine designed to save a life might harm one is devastating. "You don't just say 'well, knowledge, it comes with a price,'" he says. "You take that personally." Keith Johnston teaches in the Department of English and History at Algoma University  |
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