Polio and the Race for a Vaccine

Polio and the Race for a Vaccine

The Coronavirus not only took us by surprise in winter, but we seem to have lost the spring. It canceled weeks of our scheduled lives: vacations, business trips, conferences, weddings, and birthdays have vanished in the confusing fog that has become enduring COVID-19. We are fated to remember these past two or three months, and more that will follow. How we first processed the news, what we lost and grieved, and where we socially isolated, will be memories we share
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I was born in 1952, the summer that the notorious poliomyelitis epidemic approached its most significant number of cases – over 59,000. Of course, I recollect none of those first few years of life and how the terror of polio may have touched my family and friends. I have no idea if I received the Salk vaccine, by injection, in the 50s. I may have, instead, received the sugar cube vaccine in the early 60s. Polio only influenced my life minimally. My high school boyfriend’s mother was a 1952 polio survivor just after her youngest child was born. She walked with crutches due to paralysis caused by the virus. My stepbrother contracted polio around the age of 5 or 6 and had constraints of neck movement since surviving the illness.
Polio had been around for years before the 20th century. An outbreak of the epidemic in Vermont in 1894 resulted in 132 cases. In 1916 it struck with a vengeance, particularly in New York City, and specifically to children under the age of 5. Some New York City children with polio were isolated in sanitariums, away from their loved ones that year.
Outbreaks waxed and waned the next thirty years, striking without warning from June to September. Parents grasped their children close – the usual summer activities like birthday and slumber parties were abandoned if cases were prevalent. Playgrounds were sometimes empty. Movie theaters and swimming pools – normal activities for children of the times – were closed. Fear swept through cities, communities, and neighborhoods. In some towns, schools were closed in early June or remained closed in September.
At the end of WWII, US soldiers’ return and the baby boom brought a surge in polio. After 1948, cases rose each summer by 5,000. In 1952, the summer I was an infant, poliomyelitis cases crested with over 59,000 cases. 3,145 people died in the United States. Survivors of the disease suffered long-lasting effects – 15,000 people a year suffered some paralysis from polio. Some lived in iron lungs, while others endured only limited movements of the neck or extremities.
72% of polio cases produced little or no symptoms or resulted in full recovery. Accidental deaths claimed ten times more lives than polio, cancer three times as many. However, panicked and terrified parents, apprehensive for their children acquiring the virus, urged the government in the early 1950s to find a vaccine or a cure. Parents wanted to keep their children safe.
The story of the race to find a vaccine is …