Polio Vaccination Quotes

Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Who owns the patent on this vaccine?' 'Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. ... Choose science.

I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

The drops (polio vaccine) were designed,said these believers. Their intention and effect was genocidal. Nobody was to swallow them, or administer them to infants. Within months, polio was back...

My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals.

In 1955, amid the great fanfare that accompanied the initial release of the [polio] vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk was asked who owned the patent. He replied, "Well, the people, I would say. Could you patent the sun?

vaccine for polio had been developed,

When Jonas Salk, a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, found it and developed the first polio vaccine in 1952, he did not patent the lifesaving treatment. "There is no patent," Salk told the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow: "Could you patent the sun?

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes. Before Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for polio that finally worked, he tried two hundred unsuccessful ones. Somebody asked him, “How did it feel to fail two hundred times?” “I never failed two hundred times in my life,” Salk replied. “I was taught not to use the word ‘failure.’ I just discovered two hundred ways how not to vaccinate for polio.

Sometimes Fazlullah appeared galloping in on a black horse. His men stopped health workers giving polio drops, saying the vaccinations were an American plot to make Muslim women infertile so that the people of Swat would die out.

Barbara Loe Fisher failed to note that many scientists before Wakefield had published papers proving the rare tragic consequences of vaccines without risking their career—for example, William Sawyer, who showed that a yellow fever vaccine had been contaminated with hepatitis B virus; Neil Nathanson, who showed that a polio vaccine wasn’t properly inactivated, causing children to become paralyzed and die; and Trudy Murphy, who showed that an early rotavirus vaccine caused intestinal blockage, killing one child. Scientists and public health officials didn’t marginalize Wakefield because he had challenged the belief that vaccines are absolutely safe; they did it because he was wrong—clearly and inescapably wrong.

It was a wicked game. “Homer,” says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. “The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart’s music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.

Someday, scientists will discover a vaccine, a prophylactic, a cure, and people will talk about ALS the way they talk about polio. Parents will tell their children that people used to get something called ALS, and they died from it. It was a horrible disease that paralyzed its victims. Children will vaguely imagine the horror of it for a moment before skipping along to a sunnier topic, fleetingly grateful for a reality that will never include those three letters.

The concern scientists had regarding passenger viruses was not unfounded. You may recall the disastrous SV40 monkey virus which contaminated the polio vaccines. There are scientists who claim this virus is the cause of multiple human cancers. On CDC’s website a page on vaccine safety, which was suddenly removed (archived copies exist), states that: “SV40 virus has been found in certain types of cancer in humans, but it has not been determined that SV40 causes these cancers.

Who owns the patent on this vaccine?' 'Well, the people, I would say. There is not patent. Could you patent the sun?

From Lankaster to Lorenz, scientists have gotten it wrong. Parasites are complex, highly adapted creatures that are at the heart of the story of life. If there hadn't been such high walls dividing scientists who study life - the zoologists, the immunologists, the mathematical biologists, the ecologists - parasites might have been recognized sooner as not disgusting, or at least not merely disgusting. If parasites were so feeble, so lazy, how was it that they could manage to live inside every free-living species and infect billions of people? How could they change with time so that medicines that could once treat them became useless? How could parasites defy vaccines, which could corral brutal killers like smallpox and polio?

Far more potently than any miracle medicine, relatively uncelebrated shifts in civic arrangements--better nutrition, housing, and sanitation, improved sewage systems and ventilation--had driven TB mortality down in Europe and America. Polio and smallpox had also dwindles as a result of vaccinations. Cains wrote, "The death rates from malaria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy, pellagra, and other scourges of the past have dwindled in the US because humankind has learned how to prevent these diseases.... To put most of the effort into treatment is to deny all precedent.

Sir,” I said, “except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

They were still talking about polio, now by recalling its frightening precursors. His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria. She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result.

In 2011, defying most expert predictions, India became polio free. It was one of the greatest accomplishments in global health, and India did it with an army of more than 2 million vaccinators who traversed the entire country to find and vaccinate every child.

One of the interesting takeaways from both the Antonine plague and polio is what a difference a strong leader can make during an epidemic. Marcus Aurelius’s swift response to the Antonine plague—and his attempt to help cover expenses for the general populace and rebuild the parts of the army decimated by the disease—staved off the fall of the Roman Empire, at least temporarily. When FDR took up polio as a cause, America followed his lead and went to work eradicating it. Although his role may not have been as significant, Eisenhower is also to be commended for trying to ensure that cost did not prohibit any child from receiving the polio vaccine, and that the vaccine was shared with the world. Those men each acknowledged the seriousness of their crises and went about bravely confronting the disease in their midst head-on. They did not ignore it or glamorize it or shame people for having it, because that never works. That strategy just gives diseases more time to multiply and kill people. Diseases are delighted when you refuse to take them seriously.

According to the BBC, more than sixty polio workers, or their drivers or guards, have been murdered in Pakistan since 2012. (The CIA, it’s worth pointing out, inadvertently fanned the flames of distrust by setting up a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad in 2011, as part of an effort to confirm Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts by having vaccine workers surreptitiously collect DNA samples from Bin Laden’s family members. When the stunningly misguided plan came to light, it put every vaccine worker in the country under suspicion.)

Polio was effectively eliminated throughout the world. And then people just … kind of forgot all about polio. This seems to be the human response to any disease. People forget diseases ever existed the minute they are no longer being affected by them. Maybe that’s understandable. Maybe if we all thought about all the potential diseases the world is teeming with, and the extent to which we are, every day, dancing on the edge of a volcano, the world would seem too terrifying to walk around in at all. Or we’d just vaccinate our kids.

The manager thunks down a couple of steps, glares at her, glares at her for rather a long time. The manager, clearly, is tempted. That momentary glimpse of flesh has been ricocheting around in his brain for half an hour. He is wracking his mind with vast cosmological dilemmas. Y.T., hopes that he does not try anything, because the dentata's effects can be unpredictable. "Make up your fucking mind," she says. It works. This fresh burst of culture shock rattles the jeek out of his ethical conundrum. He gives Y.T. a disapproving glower -- she, after all, forced him to be attracted to her, forced him to get horny, made his head swim -- she didn't have to get arrested, did she? -- and so on top of everything else he's angry with her. As if he has a right to be. This is the gender that invented the polio vaccine?

1921, America had about 200,000 cases of diphtheria; by the early 1980s, with vaccination, that had fallen to just 3. In roughly the same period, whooping cough and measles infections fell from about 1.1 million cases a year to just 1,500. Before vaccines, 20,000 Americans a year got polio. By the 1980s, that had dropped to 7 a year.

Faye keeps forgetting what she'll be giving up if she decides to stay here. Access to modern medicine, for starters. In 2015 people can survive cancer, tuberculosis, scarlet fever. Vaccines eradicated polio and measles. Do you really want to live in a world with iron lungs and polio, Faye? Do you?” “I guess I could go back to 2015 and live in a world with meth, heroin, terrorism, HIV and Ebola. Huge improvement, right?

personage was formally identified upon entrance: Acclaimed eighty-seven-year-old poet Robert Frost; father of antibiotics Selman Waksman; literature Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck; astronaut John Glenn; immunologist Thomas Weller, whose virus research enabled the polio vaccine; J. Robert Oppenheimer, Manhattan Project director; celebrated novelists James Baldwin and William Styron—in all, a parade of 127 guests and their spouses.

in practical terms there are surprisingly few differences between Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Jewish Israel. All are bureaucratic nation-states, all pursue more or less capitalist policies, all vaccinate kids against polio, and all rely on chemists and physicists to make bombs. There is no such thing as Shiite bureaucracy, Sunni capitalism, or Jewish physics. So how do we make people feel loyal to one human tribe and hostile to another?

In 2012, a Taliban leader in northern Pakistan banned polio vaccination in his region until the United States ceased drone strikes there. Vaccination campaigns, he claimed, were a form of American espionage. While resembling the rumors of secret plots in Nigeria, this was, unfortunately, more easily verifiable. In pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the CIA had used a fake vaccination campaign—administering real hep B vaccine, but not the three doses necessary for immunity—to gather DNA evidence to help verify bin Laden’s location. This deception, like other acts of war, would cost the lives of women and children. The Lady Health Workers of Pakistan, a team of over 110,000 women trained to deliver health care door-to-door, had already endured years of brutal intimidation by the Taliban and hardly needed association with the CIA. Not long after the Taliban banned immunization, nine polio vaccinators, five of them women, were murdered in a coordinated series of attacks.

In the twenty-first century religions don't bring rain, they don't cure illnesses, they don't build bombs but they do get to determine who are 'us' and who are 'them', who we should cure and who we should bomb. As noted earlier, in practical terms there are surprisingly few differences between Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia and Jewish Israel. All are bureaucratic nation states, all pursue more or less capitalist policies, all vaccinate kids against polio, and all rely on chemists and physicists to make bombs. There is no such thing as Shiite bureaucracy, Sunni capitalism or Jewish physics. (page 87)

AIDS education taught us the importance of protecting our bodies from contact with other bodies, and this seems to have bred another kind of insularity, a preoccupation with the integrity of the individual immune system. Building, boosting, and supplementing one’s personal immune system is a kind of cultural obsession of the moment. I know mothers who believe this is a viable substitute for vaccination, and who understand themselves as raising children with superior immune systems. But children with superior immune systems can still pass disease. Pertussis, like polio and Hib disease and HIV, can be carried without symptoms.

Another huge boost can be attributed to vaccines. In 1921, America had about 200,000 cases of diphtheria; by the early 1980s, with vaccination, that had fallen to just 3. In roughly the same period, whooping cough and measles infections fell from about 1.1 million cases a year to just 1,500. Before vaccines, 20,000 Americans a year got polio. By the 1980s, that had dropped to 7 a year. According to the British Nobel laureate Max Perutz, vaccinations might have saved more lives in the twentieth century even than antibiotics. The one thing no one doubted was that practically all the credit for the great advances lay securely with medical science.

On April 12, 1955, a team of scientists announced that Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio—the disease that had killed thousands a year, paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt, and sent many children into iron lungs—was proven safe. According to Richard Carter’s history of the discovery, on that day “people observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes, . . . took the rest of the day off, closed their schools or convoked fervid assemblies therein, drank toasts, hugged children, attended church, smiled at strangers, and forgave enemies.”4 The city of New York offered to honor Salk with a ticker-tape parade, which he politely declined.

In the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the northeast’s power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli. It reeked of souring milk. An annoyingly upbeat fellow-shopper chirped, “Cheer up, everybody, we’re part of history!” Maybe because I was suffering the effects of allergy eyes brought on the night before by trying to read by the light of lilac-scented candles about a political murder committed around the time of the Spanish-American War, I snapped at him. “Sir,” I said, “except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

In 1931, at the age of four, my father was diagnosed with polio. He was immediately put into an isolation room at the local hospital in Brooklyn, New York. There was no cure and no vaccine for polio at that time, and city dwellers lived in fear of its spread. For several weeks my father had no human contact, save for an occasional visit by a masked nurse. His mother came to see him every day, but that’s all she could do—wave to him and try to talk to him through the glass pane on the door. My father remembers calling out to her, begging her to come in. It must have broken her heart, and one day she ignored the rules and went in. She was caught and sternly reprimanded. My father recovered with no paralysis, but this image has always stayed with me: a small boy alone in a room, gazing at his mother through a pane of glass.

Though she had spoken only rarely and had had no real friends, everybody possessed his own vivid memories of Cecilia. Some of us had held her for five minutes as a baby while Mrs. Lisbon ran back into the house to gether purse. Some of us had played in the sandbox with her, fighting over a shovel, or had exposed ourselves to her behind the mulberry tree that grew like deformed flesh through the chain link fence. We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under our tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes, had stopped her from picking her scabs on numerous occasions, and had cautioned her against touching her mouth to the drinking fountain at Three Mile Park. A few of us had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to ourselves, knowing that she was the weird sister.

MMR, polio, and varicella are live attenuated vaccines. The contaminants and excipients include human MRC5 cells, Human WI-38 lung cells, monkey kidney cells, guinea pig cell cultures and bovine serum. Live viral vaccines are all grown in human and animal cells lines and these animal and human cell lines contain human and animal retroviruses (adventitious agents which can recombine to generate new infectious retroviruses during the manufacture.) In addition to the animal and human retroviral contaminants, the carcinogen formaldehyde, antibiotics which dysregulate the GI [gastro-intestinal] and nasopharyngal microbiomes, glutamate, and bio-incompatible contaminants including nickel and chromium (EXH 6) can synergize in toxicity and the development of neuroinflammatory, neurodegenerative and neuroimmune diseases and cancer which can become clinically apparent decades later.10

Five years later, Albert Sabin published the results of an alternative polio vaccine he had used in an immunization campaign in Toluca, Mexico, a city of a hundred thousand people, where a polio outbreak was in progress. His was an oral vaccine, easier to administer than Salk’s injected one. It was also a live vaccine, containing weakened but intact poliovirus, and so it could produce not only immunity but also a mild contagious infection that would spread the immunity to others. In just four days, Sabin’s team managed to vaccinate more than 80 percent of the children under the age of eleven—26,000 children in all. It was a blitzkrieg assault. Within weeks, polio had disappeared from the city. This approach, Sabin argued, could be used to eliminate polio from entire countries, even the world. The only leader in the West who took him up on the idea was Fidel Castro. In 1962, Castro’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution organized 82,366 local committees to carry out a succession of weeklong house-to-house national immunization campaigns using the Sabin vaccine. In 1963, only one case of polio occurred in Cuba.

One particularly distressing example of the high cost to feminist progress exacted by the war is what happened in Pakistan after the capture of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. In the run-up to his capture, the CIA and the U.S. military allegedly worked with the charity Save the Children in hiring Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician, to run a fake Hepatitis B vaccination program as a front for their surveillance operations.15 Per CIA instructions, Dr. Afridi and a female healthcare worker visited the bin Laden compound under the guise of administering vaccinations and managed to gain access, although they did not see bin Laden. In 2012, all foreign Save the Children staff were expelled from Pakistan, and in 2015, the entire organization there was required to shut its doors, despite having denied (and continuing to deny) that it was involved in this effort. The CIA managed to get their guy, but when the Pakistanis, irate at not having been told about the raid, expelled U.S. military trainers from Islamabad, they were immediately threatened with a cut of the $800 million aid package that the U.S. had promised, thus exposing yet again the coercive power that aid wields. The loss of aid money was not, however, the worst impact of the tragedy. As the British medical journal The Lancet reported, the unintended victims of the tragedy were the millions of Pakistani children whose parents now refused to have them vaccinated amidst rising rates of polio, a disease that vaccination had essentially extinguished in Western countries by the mid-twentieth century.16 In their view, if the CIA could hire a doctor to run a fake vaccine program, then the whole premise of vaccinations became untrustworthy. Within a few years of the raid, Pakistan had 60 percent of all the world’s confirmed polio cases.17

We believe that modern-day Hitlers have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with anti-fertility drugs and contaminated it with certain viruses which are known to cause HIV and AIDS,” the chairman of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria maintained, urging parents to refuse vaccination.

Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research: “At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.” A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes? But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My

That’s the problem with vaccines. When they work, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing. Parents go on with their lives, not once thinking that their child was saved from meningitis caused by Hib or from liver cancer caused by hepatitis B or from fatal pneumonia caused by pneumococcus or from paralysis caused by polio. We live in a state of blissful denial.

Our bodies have three types of immunity:   Infant Immunity Innate Immunity Acquired Immunity, or Humoral immunity   First of all there is infant immunity, the one you were born with. About the middle of the second trimester of your development, which would be around 20 weeks, some of your mother’s antibodies passed across the placental barrier into your blood stream. As far as modern science knows, in your mother’s womb, your developing body is completely sterile. Your blood is clean and so is your gut, free from any bacterium or virus. You will not encounter them, for the most part, until you are born. So in the second half of your fetal development these antibodies, which you received from your mother, are floating in your blood stream and will be ready to act when you take your first breath.   You received these from your mother because your body will not have the ability to make these antibodies until you are around 12 months of age - this is important to know. After six months, the mother’s antibodies you were born with begin to decrease as your own infant immunity begins to strengthen. This is why you rarely hear of infectious diseases like diphtheria, measles, and polio ever bothering an infant in the first sixth months of their life, unless this beautiful orchestra is somehow disrupted by outside influences such as antibiotics and/or other medicines, heavy metals, environmental toxins, and especially vaccines at any time during the first year of life. The thing to remember here is babies don’t have the ability to create antibodies until around the 12th month. So why are we injecting virus’ into their little bodies?   Any honest immunologist, communicable disease specialist, or public health official will tell you why babies are vaccinated prior to one year of age. It is simply to train the parents to bring their children into the doctor’s office for inoculations.

That’s the problem with vaccines. When they work, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing. Parents go on with their lives, not once thinking that their child was saved from meningitis caused by Hib or from liver cancer caused by hepatitis B or from fatal pneumonia caused by pneumococcus or from paralysis caused by polio. We live in a state of blissful denial.

Our understanding of evolution came to us by exactly the same method of scientific discovery that led to printing presses, polio vaccines, and smartphones.

As clean water became more common in the United States, infants were no longer regularly exposed to polio and therefore did not develop immunity naturally.

In other cases, the reasons for forgetting are more prosaic, more epidemiological, more related to numbers: the particular pandemic disease was not fatal enough (2009 H1N1 influenza), or it did not afflict enough people because it was not infectious enough (MERS), or it burned out too fast (SARS-1), or it afflicted a confined subgroup of the human population (Ebola), or it was brought low by a vaccine (measles and polio), or by treatment (HIV), or by eradication (smallpox), allowing most people to simply push the disease out of their minds. While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

The Ebola outbreak in Early March coincided with three separate vaccination campaigns countrywide: a cholera oral vaccine effort by Medicins Sans Frontieres under the WHO; and UNICEF-funded prevention programs against meningitis and polio.14

[Jonas] Salk never stopped trying to be of “some help to humankind.” In 1962 he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which he hoped would serve as “a cathedral to science.” The competition to work there was so steep that Salk joked, “I couldn’t possibly have become a member of this institute if I hadn’t founded it myself.”42 Salk continued to work until he died of heart failure in 1993. During the last years of his life he devoted his attention to finding a vaccine for AIDS. He said he knew that many people expected him to fail in his attempts, but he maintained, “There is no such thing as failure. You can only fail if you stop too soon.”43 He never did develop that vaccine, maybe simply because death stopped him. But he never gave up. And he never stopped believing in the fundamental capacity for goodness in people. “What is important is that we, Number one: Learn to live with each other,” he said in 1985. “Number two: Try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment … the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other.” Sometimes, as we go about our lives, we’re angry, or other people are angry. We’re idiots, or they are. Maybe it seems a lot to expect that we can lift up our fellow man and bring out the best in everyone. But we’ve done it before. We can work miracles when we come together to help one another. Just look at how we all cured polio.

Rushing to bring a vaccine to market could also cause other sorts of safety problems in its manufacturing. Infamously, this happened in the Cutter Incident during the early launch of the polio vaccine, in 1955. When the polio vaccine was made available, mass vaccination days were organized by local communities. More than 120,000 children received a batch of the vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus was incomplete. Within days, there were reports of children developing paralysis, and the mass immunization program was abandoned within a month. Investigation showed that two batches of the vaccine, manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, had the live virus, resulting in symptoms in forty thousand people, permanent paralysis in fifty-one, and death in five; and this does not include cases of the virus spreading to other children.

For example, in England, prior to the introduction of mandatory vaccinations in 1953, there were two smallpox deaths per 10,000 inhabitants per year. But at the beginning of the 1970s, nearly 20 years after the introduction of mandatory vaccinations, which had led to a 98 percent vaccination rate,195 England suffered 10 smallpox deaths per 10,000 inhabitants annually; five times as many as before. “The smallpox epidemic reached its peak after vaccinations had been introduced,“ summarizes William Farr, who was responsible for compiling statistics in London.

The old man was on to something. The summer of the city’s resurrection had also been the summer of scams—coal scams, iron-ore scams, housing scams, insurance scams, stamp-paper scams, phone-license scams, land scams, dam scams, irrigation scams, arms and ammunition scams, petrol-pump scams, polio-vaccine scams, electricity-bill scams, school-book scams, God Men scams, drought-relief scams, car-number-plate scams, voter-list scams, identity-card scams—in which politicians, businessmen, businessmen-politicians and politician-businessmen had made off with unimaginable quantities of public money.

In 1991 Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, said: ‘At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge

Vaccination has made smallpox extinct in the wild, as well as rinderpest, a relative of measles that affects cattle and buffalo, among others. Poliomyelitis, which has in its heyday killed and maimed millions of children and adults alike, is close to eradication, with fewer than 200 wild-type cases documented in 2020. Vaccines are some of the most effective public health interventions against infectious disease.

The day the polio vaccine was announced as safe and 90% effective, Jonas Salk refused to commercialize it or obtain a patent

it took two hundred years from the first smallpox outbreak in 1595 before a vaccine was invented to prevent the disease. From the first instance of polio in 1895, scientists worked for more than fifty years before a successful vaccine was developed. But within just twelve months of the discovery of SARS-CoV-2, multiple highly effective vaccines were shipped around the world.

still can't believe that). Babies just eight-weeks-old have a single jab against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, haemophilus influenzae type b and polio and another against pneumococcal disease. Then, as if that were not enough, babies of three

In time, it proved possible to vaccinate against not only smallpox, anthrax, and rabies, but also, for example, polio, measles, diphtheria, tetanus, mumps, pertussis, and rubella in a seemingly ever-lengthening cascade. The strategy has eradicated smallpox, and the campaign against polio is presently at its critical moment.

The majority of what's happening at any given moment in the global economy can be tied back to a handful of past events that were nearly impossible to predict. The most common plot of economic history is the role of surprises. The reason surprises occur is not because our models are wrong, or our intelligence is low. It's because the odds that Adolf Hitler's parents argued on the evening nine months before he was born were the same as them conceiving a child. Technology is hard to predict, because Bill Gates may have died from Polio if Jonas Salk got cranky and gave up on his quest to find a vaccine. The reason we couldn't predict the student loan growth, is because an airport security guard may have confiscated a hijacker's knife on 9/11. That's all there is to it.

In the twenty-first century religions don't bring rain, they don't cure illnesses, they don't build bombs - but they do get to determine who are 'us' and who are 'them', who we should cure and who we should bomb. As noted earlier, in practical terms there are surprisingly few differences between Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia and Jewish Israel. All are bureaucratic nation states, all pursue more or less capitalist policies, all vaccinate kids against polio, and all rely on chemists and physicists to make bombs. There is no such thing as Shiite bureaucracy, Sunni capitalism or Jewish physics. (page 87)

Not a direct quote, but referenced in the author's note at the end - Sister Elizabeth Kenny, was instrumental in developing a new method of treating polio. Barbara Johnson, a laboratory technician who was paralyzed with polio after a workplace accident but went on the work with Sabin as his statistician. Isabel Morgan vaccine successfully induced immunity in monkeys and was the basis of Jonas Salk's entry into the vaccine race. We'd be talking about the Morgan vaccine if she hadn't refused to test the vaccine on children. Elsie Ward perfected the technique for growing the virus outside a living body. Her technique allowed Salk's lab to make enough of the virus to put in the vaccines for millions of children. Whistleblower Bernice Eddy reported that test monkeys who got the vaccine from Cutter laboratories were developing polio, thus alerting officials that Cutter would be releasing unsafe vaccines for use. -- Her concerns were ignored and caused 200 children to acquire Polio through the vaccine. Many of the children were paralyzed. Some died. Federal regulations of vaccines was tightened because of this - and her. Eleanor Abbott invented the game Candy Land to amuse patients after she herself was hospitalized for the disease.

But the swine flu pandemic was a dud, and HHS’s response was a global embarrassment. Only one casualty—a soldier at Fort Dix34—succumbed to the “pandemic,” and Merck’s experimental vaccine triggered a national epidemic of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a devastating form of paralysis resembling polio, before regulators recalled the jab.

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

virtually all of Gates’s blockbuster African and Asian vaccines—polio, DTP, hepatitis B, malaria, meningitis, HPV, and Hib—cause far more injuries and deaths than they avert.

After silencing Eddy, NIH gave the contaminated vaccine to 99 million baby boomers, who suffered a tenfold increase in soft tissue cancers, resulting in a public health disaster that dwarfs the harms of polio.

A study by Oxford’s Clinical Infectious Diseases Periodical found that Gates’s oral polio vaccine is not only giving kids polio, but also “seems to be ineffective in stopping polio transmission.” By 2018, the WHO conceded, 70 percent of global polio cases came from Gates’s vaccines.

Then, in 1955, the Salk vaccine was licensed. Porter watched in amazement and anger as several of his Christian Science classmates refused to get it. He thought of what the vaccine would have meant to his father’s life, and he cut his ties with the church. “That is not what I would call moral thinking,” he says. The polio vaccine’s success was profound. In 1952, the year Jonas Salk first began to test it in humans, the United States had 57,879 cases. By 1957, two years after the vaccine was approved for broad use, the number had fallen to 5,485, and by 1964 it was 122.

in September 2014, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) revealed that the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline had released more than eleven gallons of concentrated live polio virus into rivers near Rixen, Belgium. The release, termed accidental, if in fact purposeful, would demonstrate a reliable way to ensure that the polio vaccine continues to be in high demand.

Under pressure from the killed vaccine, polio retreated to those reservoirs of susceptible people beyond the reach of the vaccinators. Instead of remaining the “new polio” of the comfortable and the clean, the disease became instead an affliction of the poor, of ethnic minorities, and of religious groups that opposed vaccination (such as the Dutch Reformed Church).

Cutter’s vaccine also started a polio epidemic: 113 people in the children’s families or communities were paralyzed, and 5 died. It was one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in U.S. history.

vaccinators—recruited by the committees and trained for just half an hour—administered candies or sugar cubes permeated with live attenuated poliovirus. The goal was to immunize every susceptible child in Cuba. Castro’s invention of vaccination days, coupled with the use of Sabin’s doses, achieved rapid success in interrupting transmission and making Cuba the first country to eliminate polio.

One was that, as live viruses, the attenuated Sabin poliovirus strains always possessed the potential to revert by mutation to virulence and neurotropism, leading to outbreaks of “vaccine-associated paralytic polio.” This possibility—that the vaccine itself would unleash epidemic disease—is not simply theoretical. Outbreaks of vaccine-associated polio occurred in the Philippines (2001), Madagascar (2002), China (2004), and Indonesia (2005).

Of the incidents of vaccine-associated polio, the most important example, as of mid-2018, is ongoing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). There, in the wake of campaigns administering Sabin’s OPV, type 2 virus has reverted to virulence and has caused thirty cases of paralysis in three widely separated provinces.

Jonas Salk (1914–1995), who was first to develop an effective vaccine against polio, argued, “We know only too well the uniqueness of paralytic poliomyelitis, among all of the infectious diseases; the unusual combination that exists here is the terror and tragedy inflicted to a degree that is out of all proportion to the frequency of attack.

I WAS THE CATCHER for the Lake Luzerne Dodgers, a catcher with meager talent, a catcher in awe of Danny and Teddy. Danny was the first baseman and Teddy, the coach's son, was the left fielder. They were natural athletes: they could hit fastballs (a small miracle of hand-eye coordination that I never mastered), and they glided around the base paths with the grace of gazelles. They were, to a ten-year-old who was batting .111, the embodiment of beauty and summer and health. As I drifted to sleep at night, it was often with the image of Danny, horizontal and three feet off the ground, spearing a line drive, or of Teddy stretching a single into a double by slipping under the tag. In the early hours of a chilly, August, upstate New York morning, my father woke me. "Danny's got polio," he said. A week later Teddy got it too. My parents kept me indoors, away from other kids. Little League was suspended, the season unfinished. The next time I saw Danny, his throwing arm was withered and he couldn't move his right leg. I never saw Teddy again. He died in the early fall. But the next summer, the summer of 1954, there was the Salk vaccine. All the kids got shots. Little League resumed. The Lake Luzerne Dodgers lost the opening game to the Hadley Giants. The fear that kept us housebound melted away and the community resumed its social life. The epidemic was over. No one else I knew ever got polio.

Before 1980, ownership gridlock was not a major problem for drug developers. Scientists published their research findings more or less freely and were rewarded for their labor with academic tenure, peer recognition, lecture invitations, awards, and maybe even a Nobel Prize. Recognition (and not ownership) was enough to spur the great twentieth-century biomedical innovations—humanity-transforming discoveries from penicillin to the polio vaccine.

By 2018, the WHO conceded, 70 percent of global polio cases came from Gates’s vaccines.150

A trial in 1954 randomly injected 600,000 US children with either polio vaccine or salt water.30 The vaccine proved effective, and immunisation of all American children began the following year.

The CIA again used public health workers in Pakistan in 2011. According to an editorial in Scientific American, titled “How the CIA’s Fake Vaccination Campaign Endangers Us All,” the CIA, hoping to identify Osama bin Laden’s family, used a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA from residents in Abbottabad who were living close to bin Laden’s suspected hideout (1). After bin Laden’s capture and death on May 2, 2011, the fake scheme came to light, and villagers along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border chased off vaccination workers, accusing them of being spies. The misuse of public health workers had repercussions. In December 2012, nine female Pakistani workers were gunned down while administering polio vaccinations, prompting the UN to withdraw vaccination teams. A similar attack occurred in Nigeria in February 2013, when nine female vaccination workers were massacred. These attacks are presumed to be retaliation for the vaccinator ruse in the capture of bin Laden. In January 2013, several deans of US schools of public health signed a letter to President Barack Obama stating their belief that public health programs should not be used as cover for covert operations and urging the president to assure the public that this type of practice would not be repeated (2). The president did not respond.

Jonas Salk tested early preparations of his polio vaccine in retarded children at the Polk State School outside of Pittsburgh. At the time of Salk’s experiments, no one in the government, the public, or the media objected to such testing. Everyone did it. Hilary Koprowski, working for the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories, put his experimental live polio vaccine into chocolate milk and fed it to several retarded children in Petaluma, California,

On April 13, 1955, Mayor Robert F. Wagner of New York City had wired President Eisenhower to URGENTLY REQUEST ESTABLISHMENT OF FEDERAL SUPERVISORY ALLOCATIONS OF SALK VACCINE SIMILAR TO THOSE SET UP IN THE EARLY DAYS OF PENICILLIN. The mayor wasn’t alone. Even those who opposed a large government role in this matter were shocked to learn that the Eisenhower administration had made no plans for the distribution of polio vaccine, believing that the drug companies could best handle it on their own. When asked by a Senate committee whether this inaction had led directly to the current shortage, Mrs. Hobby gave a candid, if suicidal, response. “I would assume that this is an incident unique in medical history,” she mused. “I think no one could have foreseen the public demand.”15

In Taliban-controlled portions of Pakistan, “Polio vaccinations have been declared haram by the ulema, and the government campaign has subsequently stalled.” Like car insurance, vaccinations are a form of presumption. Only with the expulsion of the Taliban from the Swat Valley in the late summer of 2009 was the Pakistani government able to resume vaccinations.

It reminds me about Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, said when asked what the main aim of his life had been: ‘to be a good ancestor.’ A comment like that can only come from a man profoundly aware of his place in the universe.

The answer to the polio mystery, also well known, came from Jonas Salk, who was born in New York City of Russian Jewish immigrant parents and eventually was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (by way of New York University and Michigan). His vaccine weakened the poliovirus with formaldehyde and mineral water. It effectively “killed” the poliovirus. But it was recognizable enough for the immune system to pick it up. Ta-da! It cut the risk of infection in half. The country scrambled to produce and disseminate the vaccine as quickly as possible. Alas, this happy ending comes with an asterisk. The first big batch of vaccine wasn’t properly made. Cutter Laboratories in California, one of the main producers of the vaccine, inoculated more than 200,000 children in 1955, and within days there were reports of paralysis. Within a month, the program was discontinued, and investigations revealed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.