Polio Vaccine Announced
Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was declared safe and effective, beginning the end of polio
April 12, 1955
The Vaccine That Ended the Summer Terror
On April 12, 1955, scientists announced that Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was safe and effective. Church bells rang across the United States. Parents wept in the streets. Polio — a virus that paralyzed or killed tens of thousands of children every year and had put President Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair — could now be prevented. The announcement came exactly ten years after Roosevelt's death from a polio complication, timed deliberately as a tribute.
The Trial Behind It
The Salk vaccine was tested in the largest medical trial in history up to that point — the 1954 Polio Vaccine Field Trial, involving 1.8 million children called "Polio Pioneers." Parents volunteered their children, trusting scientists they had never met with their children's lives. When the results came in showing the vaccine worked, Salk became a national hero. Asked on television who owned the patent, he said: "The people. Could you patent the sun?"
The Global Campaign
Polio cases in the US dropped by 90% within a decade of the vaccine's introduction. A second oral vaccine, developed by Albert Sabin, made mass immunization cheaper and easier. A global eradication campaign — modeled on the success against smallpox — reduced global polio cases from 350,000 per year in 1988 to just a handful today. The disease has been eliminated from all but a few countries. Eradication is within reach.