For your edification, go back to April, 1955. Two hundred thousand children in five western and midwestern states received the newly developed polio vaccine. Undoubtedly their families were relieved that their children could be inoculated against the scourge of polio myelitis that paralyzed generations of American children. There was an undetected problem with the vaccine; within days of administration there were reports of paralysis setting in. Within a month the vaccine program had to be abandoned. A subsequent investigation of the event revealed that the vaccine manufactured by Cutter Laboratories in California contained live viruses. Forty thousand cases of polio were attributed to the faulty vaccine, which caused 400 cases of paralysis and ten deaths.
Polio was a deadly disease that affected mostly children, first identified by Karl Landsteiner in 1908. It killed hundreds every summer in the 1950's; second only to the atomic bomb, polio was the thing that Americans feared the most according to historian Paul Offit. One of America's most respected presidents, Franklin Roosevelt was a victim of the paralytic disease in his youth. Consequently there was great pressure to rapidly develop an anecdote to this plague. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin both developed vaccines, both were brilliant both flawed personalities, and bitter enemies. The Cutter incident led to the replacement of Salk's formaldehyde treated vaccine with Sabin's attenuated strain. Sabin's vaccine also had the advantage of being administered orally, fostering wide community application. Unfortunately, passage through the human gut could reactive the virus. Every year the Sabin vaccine paralyzed a few children until a safer, modified version was introduced in the 1980's.
The Cutter incident prompted two reactions. One, it improved regulation of vaccines in the United States by the FDA, until today where the country enjoys the safest vaccines on the planet, despite near hallucinatory distrust of vaccines by fringe, often fundamentalist critics. The Cutter company was found liable for the accidental deaths, even though there was no finding of negligence, opening a floodgate of litigation that almost closed down vaccine development in the US. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was introduced in 1986 to protect vaccine manufacturers from overwhelming liability, but still many developers opted out of this high risk, low profit field, leaving only a few firms to meet the demand for vaccines. Before proceeding at 'warp speed', in which pop culture is substituted for scientific caution, rational political leaders should consider the risks of nationwide administration of rushed vaccines that could have more serious side effects than the disease itself.
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