On the anniversary of his 100th birthday,
The Atlantic interviews the son of polio vaccine
researcher Dr. Jonas Salk on the polio epidemic and the forgetting that has occurred
since:
At a time when a single case of Ebola or enterovirus can
start a national panic, it’s hard to remember the sheer
scale of the polio epidemic. In the peak year of 1952,
there were nearly 60,000 cases throughout America; 3,000
were fatal, and 21,000 left their victims paralyzed. In
Frankie Flood’s first-grade classroom in Syracuse, New
York, eight children out of 24 were hospitalized for polio
over the course of a few days. Three of them died, and
others, including Janice, spent years learning to walk
again.
Then, in 1955, American children began lining up for Jonas
Salk’s new polio vaccine. By the early 1960s, the
recurring epidemics were 97 percent gone.
On misplaced concerns about vaccines and the necessity of
herd immunity:
Rothenberg Gritz: People have been
concerned by the idea that vaccines can cause disease in
healthy children.
Salk: There are some subtleties to this.
With pertussis, for instance, the old vaccine was based on
using the whole killed organism. That was very effective,
but because there were a whole lot of different kinds of
proteins that were all mixed up, there were some side
effects. Later on, they developed a so-called acellular
pertussis vaccine, where you use purified materials from
the bacterium. It doesn’t produce as strong or
long-lasting an immune response—people need to have
booster shots when they’re adults, for instance. But it
doesn’t cause the same side effects.
When my own son Michael was born 31 years ago, the
whole-cell vaccine was still in use. Whooping cough was
essentially gone in this country by that time, so from one
perspective, why should we take the risk of causing a high
fever or other side effects in our own child? I know I
certainly thought about this a lot. But I just couldn’t
bring myself to take advantage of the good that other
people had done by immunizing their kids—to take a free
ride, so to speak. Michael did end up developing a fever.
But I couldn’t have lived with my decision if we hadn’t
given him the vaccine.
On the misinformation spread by the anti-vaccine movement:
Rothenberg Gritz: Some vaccine opponents argue that as long as children live healthy lifestyles, they
can either avoid illnesses like polio or recover quickly
and develop “natural immunity.”
Salk: No. I wouldn’t hesitate to use very
strong words about that. Of course it’s a good thing to
live a healthy life, to keep the body strong and
well-rested. I won’t rule out that it can help to protect
against some types of disease. But when it comes to these
organisms that can be very damaging to people, I think
it’s wishful thinking to imagine that a healthy lifestyle
can protect against infection.
And what we see is that many diseases are starting to come
back. Measles is recurring; whooping cough is recurring.
The kids whose parents are choosing not to immunize them
are at risk, but so are babies and kids who might not be
able to be vaccinated for one reason or another. These
kids are no longer having the same benefit of herd
immunity. Their level of protection is now eroding.
[…]
Rothenberg Gritz: Why do you think this
misinformation has spread so widely?
Salk: Part of it is that people have
become complacent because these diseases aren’t rampant
anymore. During the polio epidemic, people were really
frightened. This was a disease they didn’t understand,
whose appearance they couldn’t predict, and it had
terrible effects on kids. Swimming pools and movie
theaters were closed. It’s easy to forget this now. Also,
these days, there are a lot of concerns about living
naturally and not wanting to be exposed to things that are
made in a laboratory.
But there are probably other forces at work. Back in the
1950s, people really looked to science and medicine as
something that would make their lives better. But once the
fear of these diseases began to subside, people started
looking at other large-scale forces in the world—the
Vietnam War, the government, and so on—and wondering, Canwe trust large institutions?Can we trust pharmaceutical companies? I think
that that’s something that’s driven people also: a sense
of alienation.
Read the full interview here.