The Vaccine That Beat Polio
On April 12, 1955, Dr. Thomas Francis announced that Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was 'safe, effective, and potent,' ending one of America's greatest public health fears.
For American parents in the early 1950s, summer was the season of fear. Every year, polio swept through the country, striking children without warning — a fever, a stiff neck, and then, for the unlucky, a wheelchair or an iron lung. In 1952, the worst epidemic on record, nearly 58,000 cases were reported. Parents kept their children home from swimming pools and movie theaters. No one knew who would be next.
On April 12, 1955 — the tenth anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death from a stroke, a president who had himself been a polio survivor — the fear ended. In the Rackham Auditorium at the University of Michigan, Dr. Thomas Francis Jr. announced the results of the largest medical field trial in history: more than 1.8 million children in the United States, Canada, and Finland had received an experimental vaccine. Francis's verdict was unequivocal. The vaccine was, he said, "safe, effective, and potent" — up to 90 percent effective against paralytic polio.
The vaccine's creator was Jonas Salk, a young researcher at the University of Pittsburgh whom Francis himself had once mentored. Salk had done the unthinkable: he had made a vaccine from killed poliovirus, when most experts insisted only a live virus could work. Funded by the March of Dimes — the dimes of millions of ordinary Americans — Salk tested the vaccine on himself, his wife, and his three sons before a single child in the trial received it.
When a reporter later asked Salk who owned the patent on the vaccine, he gave the answer that made him a folk hero: "Could you patent the sun?"
The effect was immediate and staggering. Within two years, American polio cases had fallen by 85 to 90 percent. A second, oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin followed in the 1960s. The last case of wild polio in the United States was recorded in 1979, and in 1994 the entire Western Hemisphere was certified polio-free. A global eradication campaign, launched in 1988, has since pushed the disease to the brink of extinction.
It matters because April 12, 1955, is one of the purest good-news days in medical history — the day science, funded by pocket change and tested at unprecedented scale, conquered a terror that had haunted every playground in America. Salk never got rich from his discovery; he got something rarer. He got to watch the fear disappear.
No image is included with this story: no photograph of Salk or the 1955 announcement could be verified as public domain or freely licensed, so no image is used.
