On this day, April 12, 1955, it was announced that the polio vaccine Jonas Salk developed was safe.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Jonas Salk



Salk in 1959

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Polio research

Further information: Polio and Polio vaccine



President Franklin D. Roosevelt meeting with Basil O'Connor



Salk in 1955 at the University of Pittsburgh



Magazine photo of Salk to O'Neill, "the most elaborate program of its kind in history, involving 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers," with over 1.8 million school children participating in the trial. A 1954 Gallup poll showed that more Americans knew about the polio field trials than could give the full name of the President.



A March of Dimes poster, c. 1957

In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive.

In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines.  Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporaneously by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine.

After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, which is now the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs in Providence, Rhode Island, Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the Retarded and Feeble-minded. He vaccinated his own children in 1953. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955.

The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two-and-a-half years.

Salk's inactivated polio vaccine came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.

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Source: https://rotary6380.org/stories/apr.-12-anniversary-of-announcement-that-the-polio-vaccine-is-safe-effective-and-potent.



Source:

Link to tweet

Source: https://blog.library.in.gov/the-polio-vaccine-in-indiana/



Source: https://blog.genealogybank.com/salks-vaccine-vanquished-poliovirus-65-years-ago.html

You can find a ton of these.

https://www.google.com/search?q=jonas+salk+polio+vaccine+newspaper+headline

[Walleye]

1. My best friend was a polio pioneer. She would've been about eight then

[jpak]

2. This was a BFD

Yup

[Casady1]

4. Those were the day's

when we believed in science instead of myth's.

[Phoenix61]

5. Back when science was revered and ignorance shunned. nt

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. "Even the popular polio shot had its haters."

HISTORY

The Loneliest Anti-Vaxxer

Even the popular polio shot had its haters.

BY NICK KEPPLER
NOV 26, 20215:45 AM



One side of a Polio Prevention Inc. flyer, undated. Eclectibles Ephemera/Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America

On March 26, 1953, virologist Jonas Salk announced a successful initial test of his polio vaccine. Newspaper front pages gleefully trumpeted good tidings. In 1952, polio had peaked in the U.S. with about 58,000 infections, resulting in 3,145 deaths and 21,269 cases of paralysis. As outbreaks moved from city to city, swimming pools and movie theaters closed, and parents safeguarded children at home. Salk’s announcement marked the start of the largest medical experiment ever conducted at the time, a placebo-controlled study of 1.8 million children in 44 states, carried out in 1954, that would pave the way for the near eradication of the disease. ... Duon H. Miller, the cantankerous owner of a cosmetics company in Florida, was having none of it.

Under the banner of his organization, Polio Prevention Inc., Miller distributed hair-raising mailers with claims like “Thousands of little white coffins will be used to bury victims of Salk’s heinous and fraudulent vaccine.” A self-made shampoo magnate, he was one of the few malcontents who publicly campaigned against the polio vaccine. His crusade shows that even during a public embrace of the polio shot that many people frustrated at COVID anti-vaxxers have held up as the ideal reaction to a new lifesaving vaccine, there was dissent, some of it as vitriolic as that you find in the corners of Twitter that swap anti-Fauci memes and Bill Gates rants—and just as weird.

To Miller, “polio” was not an infectious disease. It was a state of malnutrition caused by midcentury American diets, particularly soft drinks—his mortal enemy. “Disease and malfunction do not ‘strike’ us; we build them within ourselves,” he wrote in one of his two-sided handbills. “Children permitted to indulge heavily in soft drinks (especially ‘colas’), over-sweetened and refined starchy foods are the greatest sufferers from POLIO. NO CHILD OR ADULT ON A COMPLETELY COMPETENT AND BALANCED DIET EVER CONTRACTS POLIO.” {snip} “The flyers this Miller guy was sending out, a lot of it mirrors what we hear today” in the COVID anti-vax movements, said Jonathan M. Berman, a research scientist and author of Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement. “He was arguing about germ theory. We see people arguing about how coronavirus is misdiagnosed or is actually the flu or you can’t get it if you are in a certain state of health.” {snip} To Miller, the disease wasn’t real. The conspiracy was. The “experts” were criminals. The vaccine was actually dangerous. This was your libertarian uncle’s Facebook profile, 50 years before there was Facebook. But unlike modern anti-vaxxers, Miller depended on the U.S. Postal Service—which proved, in the end, to be a more effective gatekeeper than social media has been for us.

{snip}

He founded his cosmetics company in his garage in Dayton, Ohio, according to a 1969 obituary, and grew Duon Inc. to become one of the largest shampoo manufacturers in the U.S. Its marquee product was a shampoo called Vita-fluff. Miller’s name was frequently to be found in the society sections of newspapers. He gave photography tips in the Dayton Journal-Herald and showed off boxers from his breeding pens. His first wife sang to entertain at PTA meetings in Dayton.

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Front of 1951 pamphlet by Polio Prevention Inc. Eclectibles Ephemera/Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America

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Like today’s COVID skeptics, Miller cherry-picked physicians who were skeptical of polio as a virus and misrepresented facts. One mailer was a rapid fire of out-of-context information: Salk “isn’t entirely satisfied with the vaccine.” Some children still got polio after being vaccinated. And just as the “real” number of COVID-19 deaths pales in comparison to vaccine deaths in some dark corners of the internet, so it was with polio in Miller’s world: “Polio ‘CRIPPLES’ and Polio ‘DEATHS’ are merely ‘Statistics’ to the ‘Charity-Brokers,’ whose record to date of ‘Cripples’ and ‘Deaths’ is TRULY DISGRACEFUL.”

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[patphil]

7. They brought the vaccine right into my school, and mass vaccinated the whole school.

I don't remember exactly when, but it was mid-50's. It was that dangerous a disease, and parents had not yet been programmed to reject science.
As a result of this early vaccine, and the ones that followed, polio was all but wiped out in the US, and most of the world. Before then, thousands of kids were killed, and 10's of thousands of young kids in the US were paralyzed each year.
In terms of numbers infected, and killed, Covid-19 is much worse, but still millions reject the vaccine.
Strange how people can be programmed to act against their own self interests, and also not to be concerned about the safety of others.

[rurallib]

8. What a great day for my family when we got our shots

One very vivid memory from childhood - I was 6 or 7 when we got the vaccine - was my mom whacking my head when I tried to take a drink from a drinking fountain. Drinking from a water fountain was forbidden in our family for fear of getting polio.

[lapfog_1]

9. I have a cousin

who developed polio... she spent a lifetime in wheelchairs and with many complications.

It killed my aunt... and her younger sister has had to care for her most of her life, which was a tragedy all on its own.

3 lives affected by this disease.

I hate the anti-vax idiots with the heat of a 1000 suns.

[Ocelot II]

10. It was a big deal.

I remember not being able to go swimming in public places because of the fear of polio. My mother had been a nurse and she described taking care of kids in iron lungs - and as soon as the vaccine became available she hauled our little asses to the doctor to get it NOW, despite all our hollering about not wanting to get a shot. "Do you want to be in an iron lung?" was the response.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

11. On this day, April 13, 1955, this was the main headline on the New York Times:

Tue Apr 13, 2021: On this day, April 13, 1955, this was the main headline on the New York Times:

Announcement that Salk polio vaccine “works” and "is safe, effective, and potent” was today 1955:

Link to tweet