The Salk Vaccine and the Fuck-Up: A Medico-Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1955

(Author's Note: I'm trying out the Google auto-link insertion Blogger "beta feature" to make for a "more engaging reading experience." I wasn't impressed by the first paragraph, and have not used it below the fold. You decide whether it has added engagement.  However, I left Youtube on play after posting the clip that I intended as some kind of ironic comment about being out of touch with the medical world, and for the millionth time in my life, "the algorithm" tried to make me listen to Celtic Women. How many times do I have to hit the back button when I hear the opening bars of "Tir na Og"? The answer is "forever," because the algorithm isn't set up to gather that data. We can talk about technical feasibility, but infeasibility leads to more views of Celtic Women, and you have to be a saint not to dip into the conspiratorial line of thinking at this point. Technology and culture means resistance!) 

I'm diffident about the medical side of technological history because I don't feel as sure-footed there as I do with the hard sciences [insert reader eyeroll here], but the Salk vaccine is a pretty darn important science story, and the Salk vaccine contamination at the Cutter Laboratory is comfortably the biggest science story of June 1955 unless you want to try to make the British election/rail strike or the Le Mans crash into science/technology stories. (I've done the second and am tempted by the first, but it would just be me harping on about declinism again.)

As we know, being a bit closer to the story, Hobby was on
her way out, anyway.

The thing I can't quite get over here is that Cutter Laboratories was around until 1974, when it was bought out by Bayer. As Newsweek points out, an trade association even appointed the Cutter then running the company as its president in June to make it clear to the American public that this was what they were going to get, and they were going to like it. Although Cutter's hog cholera vaccine was a significant scientific advance (says Wikipedia), that article is mainly devoted to the company's production of a lot of Salk polio vaccine containing live polio virus instead of the required inactive-virus vaccine, leading to 40,000 cases of abortiv poliomyelitis, 56 paralytic cases, and 5 deaths, with another 113 paralytic cases and 5 deaths in people exposed to the original cases. The director of the microbiological institute that licensed Cutter Laboratories resigned, and so did, to anticipate a developing story, Ovetta Culp Hobby and the director of the NIH. 

The safety story of the polio vaccine is actually pretty hair-raising when you pursue the story. Live virii were found present in Eli Lilly, Parke-Davis, and Pitman-Moore-produced vaccines as well, but only Cutter was found liable in court. The Wiki on polio vaccines reproduces a hair-raising prehistory of polio vaccines in the United States involving the distribution of patently unsafe and unsupervised vaccines by two medical entrepreneurs of the Thirties, John Kolmer and Maurice Brodie.

"And this is good old Boston/ The home of the bean 
and the cod/ Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots/
And the Cabots talk only to God" And it's 
Henry Cabot Lodge. LIke Hiram Lodge,
Veronica's Dad. Get it? Sigh. Lodge
is significant, because we use it to denote
high status Native Ameroican homes!

Let's be clear here. There is nothing new about irresponsible vaccine manufacturers and public backlash. Benjamin Franklin's older brother, Richard, ran an anti-inoculation campaign in Boston in 1721 that drove the Mathers out of their previously dominant place in public life, clearing the way for the dominance of the "Boston Brahmins," your Cabots and Lodges. Smallpox inoculation could be dangerous, and the conversation about who was to be  treated, and why, was heated in many, many cycles of controversy over many centuries leading up to the argument within the American medical community about whether what Kolmer and Brodie were doing was safe, and whether a "killed virus" vaccine could work at all.

The story is also tied to larger questions of medical ethics. Modern doctors (okay,  my brother the pediatrician, but he's a modern doctor!) are probably more concerned about test subject consent and experiments on the mentally ill and disabled than anything else, and here we go with Hilary Koprowski's early attenuated live-virus vaccine, which was tested on "physical and mentally disabled people located in New York. Kolmer and Brodie, in contrast, tested it on themselves and their own children. 

You try buying watercress. (Salmonella.)

The story of the Salk vaccine is well known, with Salk's decision not to patent it a landmark in "conventional medicine's" fight for the moral high ground and for the American Jewish community. We can talk about the upsides and downsides of the former and be cynical about both the alternative narrative in which Salk patented the vaccine, and whether he would have gained very much from doing so. The real story of the Salk vaccine in that sense is the final victory of public health, which is much more about sanitation and food preparation than vaccines, and in that way requires a much more constant, continuous, and intrusive regime of behavioural control than a few annual needles.  One of the extraordinary things about the "Salk vaccine" is the way that it is overshadowed in public health campaigns by the attenuated live virus vaccine developed by Albert Sabin from Koprowski's early work. The Sabin virus is the one administered orally in sugar cubes. Distributed through the agency of Soviet health authorities in some countries, notably Japan, there was even a time when "Sabin versus Salk" was a "Communist versus Capitalist" story. In 1960/1, Sabin was quite publicly fighting with the March of Dimes Foundation over American distribution of the "Soviet" virus, and it is the Sabin vaccine, not the Salk vaccine, that is credited with eliminating polio, and polio epidemics, in the United States --in the early 1960s, and not the Fifties. That's your Fifties as cultural artefact rather than history, again.

Because the Sabin vaccine prevented oral-intestinal polio, the main vector of transmission of a disease that emerged as paralytic polio in only a small number of cases, which is a confusion we still get in demographic history with respect to Yersinia pestis. I suspect that there's some kind of social, cultural or even racial subtext to polio's transmission by the "oral-fecal route." That doesn't happen in middle-class families! Well, okay, maybe in swimming pools. So let's close all the swimming pools if it's the only way to stop desegregation!

So it turns out that actual people are talking about this!

In the end, the Free World had to embrace the Commie vaccine because public health is something that only Government can do, no matter how hard the March of Dimes tries, and and no matter how many times you fire Ovetta Culp Hobby. It's not going to change, no matter how many times you publicly endorse Cutter Labs while cleaning out the NIH! Because epidemics don't stop for politics, you see.

 Getting rid of swimming pools, on the other hand, that you can do.