Polio
I was reading a short story by Gene Wolfe and came on a line about the smell of the doctor's office and jar of cotton balls. I took me back to my childhood when I was five yers old waiting in my doctor's office for my polio vaccination, The office had its unique smell, which I've never come across since, probably from the antiseptic used to clean it, After the wait my mother and I were in his office. He had a jar of tongue depressors and cotton balls on his desk. He swabbed my arm with a cotton ball drenched in alcohol and plunged the syring with the vaccine into my arm. Afterwards he gave me a lolipop to keep me from crying.
After I got home I begin feeling ill and mother said, "Oh, the doctor said that could happen."
My five year old mind pondered why the doctor would give me something to make me feel ill instead of better. That paradox fixed the memory in my mind so that I recall the visit even now.
Later in school we received another polio vaccine, this time the live Sabin vaccine instead of the killed virus in the Salk vaccine. The vaccine was a sugar cube with a red dot on one side in a small paper cup, We were told not to touch the sugar cube, but to tilt our head back and toss it in our mouths. So I was twice vaccinated, doubly secure against the dreaded polio.
And it was dreaded. The other childhood diseases like measles and chicken pox were viewed back then as rites of passaage. But polio was feared, because one in a hunded times or so it attacked the nervous system and left the child paralyzed to one degree or another. A charity called "The Mothers' March of Dimes" was organized to look for a cure and you could find their little plastic banks in stores so you could contribute your change from your purchase.
So the polio vaccine was hailed as one of the great successes of medicine and even now is used as an example when people show doubt about vaccination or allopathic medicine. But if we look at the history of the polio vaccine more closely, we see the failures as well as the success making it emblematic of our public health system.
The polio vaccine was first developed as a killed virus vaccine by Dr. Salk. I was tested and made widely available in the fifties. But instead of decreasing polio, intially it increased the number of cases by two hunded thousand. Cutter Labs, one of the first companies to make the polio vaccine did not prepare it properly and injected the live polio virus into children. This has been called on of the worst medical accidents in American history. However, the problem was identified and fixed and after 1957, the first year of widespread use, the numner of new cases fell to about six thousand.
But this was not the emd of problems with the polio vaccine. The virus in the vaccine was grown on cultures of monkey cells and about ten to thirty percent of the vaccines were contaminated by a monkey virus, SV40. This virus has been shown to cause cancer in animals and is suspected of causing cancer in humans, although that is not proven. The virus was found in both forms of the polio vaccine, although it has not been present since the early sixties.
Finally, the polio vaccine has been a victim of its own success. The live, oral form of the vaccine is preferred because it it easier to administer. But the weakened form of the virus in the vaccine can revert to a stronger form and cause polio just as the wild strain does. So far some years the most prevalent cause of polio has been the vaccine against it! The killed virus vaccine can't be given to protect against it because the type of polio virus in the two vaccines is different. So until this problem is solved, polio can't be completely eliminated.
Even if polio is eliminated, there is a poorly understood condition called acute flaccid paralysis that occurs mostly in children that mimics the symptoms of polio. Fortunately, it is rare.But it is more common these days in the United States than polio. So the doctor's job is never over, one disease replaces another, and no victory is ever final or complete.
In conclusion, we must always be vigilant against sloppy and poorly thought out work by the medical profession. Criticizing those who point out problems as anti-vaxxers is not helpful, but harmful to the public health. There have been problems with vaccines before and if there is a stigma associated with finding them the public will suffer.