The Press Made the Polio Vaccine Trials Into a Public Spectacle

[IcyPeas]

As a medical breakthrough unfolded in the early 1950s, newspapers filled pages with debates over vaccine science and anecdotes about kids receiving shots

...And in 1953, the physician Jonas Salk told a national radio audience for the first time that a vaccine had proved successful in preliminary tests. "These studies provide justification for optimism, and it does appear that the approach in these investigations may lead to the desired objective,” Salk said. “But this has not yet been accomplished.”.

Maybe, he explained, after more extensive trials, it would effectively inoculate young people against the threat of polio.

Maybe.
...
The morning papers reflected Salk’s caution. In reporting carried around the country, Associated Press journalists pronounced the vaccine safe and promising, but emphasized that questions remained unanswered. Many papers led with the revelation that shots wouldn’t be available by the summer, when polio always wreaked the most havoc. In many others, the announcement didn’t even make the front page; in Wilmington, Delaware’s News Journal, it was relegated to page 40, behind pieces on the state’s annual Mother of the Year award and subway fare hikes in New York City.
...
Over the course of less than 12 months, 1.8 million children in 44 states—and in Canada and Finland—would step up to participate in the vaccine trials. It was an unprecedented scale, never matched in the country before or since. By comparison, Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine trials ended ten months after the vaccine was first developed and involved roughly 43,500 test subjects; Moderna’s, completed in the same time period, included just over 28,200.
...
It would be 24 years before polio was eradicated in the United States, with Sabin’s easier-to-administer oral vaccine taking the starring role for most of that time.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/press-made-polio-vaccine-trials-public-spectacle-180977304/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia

[Walleye]

1. My best friend says she was polio pioneer. She was born in 1946

[Timewas]

2. I recall

The line up in the high school gym for the shots, I was in 7th grade at the time so must have been 12 or 13 , that would be about 1953 or 4....

Do not have any memory of anything other than it was a really great accomplishment and we didn't have to be scared of polio every summer anymore..

[pfitz59]

4. We lined up outside the Junior High School in the early 60's.

Thousands of people, the whole town. The polio sugar cube and smallpox pricks. I remember it well

[malthaussen]

3. Anti-vaxxers want to make America Fear Again.

Since I was born in 1956, I never had occasion to be afraid of polio. In fact, I was virtually unaware of it until I read about it in some book or other.

Today, ant-vaxxers would like all of America to feel that fear that I was spared.

-- Mal