Early reports from the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca funded COVID-19 vaccine trials are welcome news. We understand the importance of making millions of Americans, and eventually, billions of citizens across the globe, have these recently created coronavirus vaccinations out.
We all remember the horrific tale of a hurried polio vaccine all too well, though. That's because of Paul Meier, a young statistician at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s who researched the 1955 polio vaccine campaign and its effects.
Meier, who passed away in 2011, was chair of statistics at the University of Chicago and then at the University of Columbia. He was one of the first and most vocal supporters of what is now the gold standard, the almost ubiquitous randomized clinical experiment, for trials of novel medicines and vaccinations. He worked with mathematician Edward Kaplan to create the Kaplan-Meier estimator, which is still used to predict patient survival in medicine.
NILES, IL - NOVEMBER 16: George Rodriguez, RN, draws a flu vaccine dose before administering vaccinations at the Maine Town Hall November 16, 2004, in Niles, Illinois. The flu shot program was organized by Advocate Lutheran General Hospital and was an appointment-only event.
How the polio antidote came to be
By the early 1950s, 13,000 to 20,000 infants remained crippled every year by polio. There was overwhelming pressure for a vaccination. In 1953, virologist Jonas Salk started research on a vaccine on the premise that if the body were given a vaccine containing the "killed" poliovirus, it would develop antibodies that would shield it from the live poliovirus.
The trick was only enough to inactivate the live virus so that it did not trigger infection, but not so much as kill its structure and stop the development of antibodies. Salk's vaccine came from production to field trials in about 2 million children within two years.
After the biggest experiment in the nation's history, which involved around 1.8 million children, Salk's polio vaccine was proved secure and successful in the mid-1950s. It took the U.S. over 20 years to eliminate polio, though. Since 1979, no polio outbreaks have been reported in the U.S., according to the CDC.
The federal government issued permits to five pharmaceutical firms in three hours of this declaration to manufacture the vaccine. On April 13, 1955, widespread vaccine development, distribution, and inoculation started thanks to political pressure.
Here's what Salk says regarding the actual state with COVID-19 vaccinations
The Jonas Salk polio vaccine wiped out much of the world's polio. That is something that more citizens expect would continue with the vaccine against the coronavirus. Salk warns that eliminating polio from the United States has been a long and complicated path, and he does not think it would be any simpler to eradicate COVID-19.
Salk is a physician and part-time instructor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh, where his father created the polio vaccine. He also leads the Foundation for the Jonas Salk Legacy.
He said it would be a long journey to bring adequate vaccinations out to citizens all over the planet. Salk points out that the COVID-19 virus struggles to respect boundaries. According to him, coronavirus spreads anywhere in the world by airplane, and it will continue to propagate and be a concern until this virus can be controlled anywhere.
Logistics aside, Salk stated vaccine hesitancy is another problem that will continue to take time to solve.
Around 46 percent of 1,000 eligible voters say they will receive the shot as soon as they could, according to the new US TODAY/Suffolk University Survey. Meanwhile, 32 percent claim that they would wait for someone to get the shots until they do so themselves.
But the unwillingness to vaccinate is not fresh to America, Salk stated. When the field trial began, just 53 percent of Americans said they felt the vaccination might work, according to a Gallup Poll from 1954.
Although the U.S. is far from eradicating COVID-19 yet, just like polio before, Salk is impressed and optimistic for the future with the coronavirus vaccinations.
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