A VACINA QUE MUDOU O MUNDO - Documentário (2010)

[Music] [Music] during the past Century um we have increased our lifespan by 30 years most of that increase is due to due to vaccines before vaccines prusis or hooping cough routinely killed 8,000 people a year mostly children rubella or German Measles would cause birth defects in as many as 20,000 children every year measles would commonly cause between 500,000 to die every year deia was was the most common killer of teenagers all this before vaccines but I think you could argue that no vaccine captured I think the emotions certainly of the American public as much as

the polio vaccine did I mean you know you looked at these children walking down the street and as as if they had had gone to War I mean as it was if they were Veterans of of a foreign war and it was young children I think it was just a very very emotional disease for this [Music] country Dr so before I hand you this citation I have no words in which adequately to express the thanks of myself all the people I know and all 164 million Americans to say nothing of all the other people in

the world that will profit from your Discovery I am very very happy to hand [Music] that [Music] when we look back upon polio today you look back upon what was really a summer plague it came every year it came like locusts and newspapers would have almost baseball box scores of the numbers of kids would come down with it in that week it would start around late May and go up in June and higher in July and spike in August and then by Labor Day the summer plague would be over it would hit this kid and

not this kid and nobody knew why it would descend on Denver but not on San Francisco and no one knew why all you knew was that every summer thousands of very unlucky kids would come down with this Insidious disease that usually left them incapacitated and often killed them people had all kinds of theories about it you shouldn't take your kids to a public pool nobody should give birthday parties I mean it was like a a phantom enemy this illness and I was scared to death as a young mother polio would spread silently and then pick

out its victim and continue to spread silently pick pick out another victim it was known by then that it was a virus disease but there was no way to treat it and there wasn't really sure how it was transmitted people weren't sure one of the great ironies of polio is that it appears to be a disease of cleanliness it begins in the United States in epidemic form early in the 20th century at the very time we are becoming increasingly antiseptic germ phobic advertising is telling us that germs are very very deadly that we don't see

them but they are killers and the more cleanliness becomes kind of a way of life in the United States the less likely young kids are to have immune systems that fight off disease easily there was a tremendous amount of myth and misinformation that surrounded the disease people thought that the the uh disease was spread by cats they thought it was spread by fleas they thought that it was it was spread by organ Grinders monkeys they thought that it was spread by bananas that had been imported from South America they thought that it could be cured

by Ox blood or or sassafras or wood shavings there were just all kinds of mist every day when I went out to play my grandmother would take a cloth bag with a piece of solid camper which is a they used to use it for Mo balls and she would put this little bag on a string put it around my neck and sent me out to play and she was sure till day she died that that she had kept me from getting polio my mother at that time would actually not let me play with new kids

the logic being that I had the germs of my older friends and there was no reason for me to get near new kids because they may spread the polio germ and it was really that kind of fear that was felt by every parent in this country there was no prevention there was no cure there was no protection you could be a good parent a bad parent an indifferent parent and you still had no way of protecting your child against [Music] polio polio is transmitted from person to person a child with polio infection comes in contact

with another child and transmits that infection the virus reproduces in the mouth it reproduces in the intestine gets into the blood and invades the nervous system and what it does is it kills a particular cell in the nervous system called the interior horn cell and this cell tells the muscles what to do it's like cutting the wires to a light bulb the light goes off well I had a bad headache and went to the doctor the next day and the following day I collapsed and they figured I had polio and Si me off the the

municipal hospital I cut polio and I was 21 months old back in 1952 our house was immediately quarantined a lot of people from the health department came to the house uh to interview my parents to find out where we've been what we did try to find out where we may have contracted uh the disease and everything and meanwhile we were all sent to Municipal hospital I started showing signs of paralysis and at that time you got in an iron lung that was what happened when you went there and you had breathing problems and I was

in an iron lung for approximately 11 days if they couldn't swallow and get all these secretions in their throat and down into their lungs and then they couldn't breathe that was a deadly combination and so they put him in an iron lung which would give positive and negative pressure to expand the chest so if they could breathe that would like pull air into the chest and push air out of the chest there was a nightmare it was a total nightmare both for the patients and for the doctors we would get these children coming up and

they would be screaming and the anxiety level was unbelievable you try to comfort them and how do you comfort a four or five-year-old he didn't even have his teddy bear he could take nothing with him and I remember the faces on some of these kids you know in agony just picture your own 2-year-old you know can't breathe and it's just Dreadful Danny was probably all my most favorite patient patient he was a little 5-year-old and he had bulber Polio so he was in a respirator uh I would tell Danny a little jokes and read them

stories and everything and it it was a beautiful relationship so I came on duty I pick up my clipboard and I looked down and I don't see Danny's name and I said to someone I said why don't I have Danny today it was the loudest silence I ever heard in my life so I dropped my clipboard and I ran I'm sorry and I ran down to his respirator and it was [Music] empty polio no treatment you just try to keep them alive with uh artificial breathing and uh physical therapy and then try to equip them

with some kind of gear that would help them walk again if you managed to save their [Music] lives really when you talk about polio infantile paralysis you you must in the united states begin with FDR with President Roosevelt he got it at the age of 39 in 1921 and spent the rest of his life really trying to find the Cure and the prevention he never found the Cure he died in 1945 still having polio what Roosevelt did was to put together a voluntary organization that was absolutely extraordinary in the past philanthropies are a few millionaires

giving money and throwing it at some project what the March of Dimes did was to turn this on its head 1 2 1 each year his birthday was celebrated with Mammoth parties in behalf of the march of [Music] dime back when it started it was called the mother's March uh and its goal was to collect money to do research to conquer children's diseases and polio was its primary target uh their name was then to the March of Dimes because a dime was the currency of the time that was a meaningful contribution from a child F

polio tonight let the marching mothers know you're waiting for them I remember uh going out with my mother uh on the mother's March and you would go around the neighborhood and if the light were on on the front porch then I would go to the house and collect a little cardboard thing that had inserts for coins to go in and we would gather those and ship those literally to the White House there are a lot of parents whose children are healthy and happy now who live in fear I know I do the fear my friends

is polio what made the march of dime such an extraordinary organization was that for one thing they used the latest techniques in advertising and public relations they got celebrities like Mickey Rooney and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley and I mean I have a picture in my book of a very uncomfortable Richard Nixon pumping gas for polio they interrupt the the the cereals in the in the mo picture house we will now have a collection of March and Diamond other kids I want to see the movie upon the quarters and dimes and dollars that you give

now in this theater depends the happiness of some child somewhere tomorrow they also use poster children you know give me your money and help me walk and it was dime by dime by dime every everyone would give whatever he or she could it would be a crusade involving tens of thousands of people and you would really make it into a national Crusade these were Americans pulling together and they were pulling together to some degree because this was a children's disease and having a visual disease where you saw leg braces and you saw crutches and you

saw iron lungs was something that was simply intolerable to the American conscience and they United as a people to do away with it I like [Applause] it I grew up in a family where there was a sense you know that my dad was a scientist and that he did science and he actually would talk about how he used to really as a child pray that he could do something good for Humanity he chose research and he said this throughout his life I chose to do research because I asked myself what can I do that's going

to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people Jonas s is brought to the University of Pittsburgh from Michigan not to work on polio but to work on influenza and what sulk understands very early on is that you know you sort of go where the money is and the money was coming from the national foundation with very very large grants for po my father had an opportunity to participate in the complete drudgery of the poliovirus typing program now that's something that no budding scientist at the beginning of his or her career would want

to take on but this was an entree here was a place he could get started I mean the good news was that there was a philanthropical base that was going to support him here the bad news was it was Pittsburgh which which at the time was in the Backwater of of science Jonah s was enormously well organized he was very hardworking and he basically could run a laboratory much as one would run a laboratory in Industry he had a lot of people that worked for him and he was very good at being able to do

difficult and arguably boring tasks quickly and well and so one of his original tasks was to try and determine how many different types of polio virus there were because if there were many types then all of them would need to be included in a vaccine in order to to do anything towards a vaccine one had to make sure that there were only three types of polio they knew that that there were three types but what if there were more it was essential I mean prior vaccines may have failed because they didn't have a representative of

the three types so it requires an intense effort to collect meaning ful information then you can analyze it and then get meaningful results Dr Su and his research team were in the basement they were looking for the live polio virus and so when a patient has to have a bow Movement we would cover the bed pan with a sterile towel and run to the door and sitting out in the hall on wooden benches would be pit medical students kind of cute too and that was their primary job was to grab that bed pan and have

it down in the lab probably within a minute or two and that's where Dr so isolated the live polio virus from a young male patient at Municipal hospital this was the job that prominent researchers prominent virologists would not do this was a job that an Albert sabbin would give to a graduate student it was scut work it was hard work it was uninteresting work but what Jonas s intuitively understood was that it was the kind of work that would get him on the March of Dimes bandwagon he was The Miracle Worker in the white coat

on the one hand but he was also an incredibly hardworking devoted scientist for whom people were willing to sacrifice and Jonas Suk at the University of Pittsburgh put together an extraordinary team of researchers and what Sal did was sort of direct this team and whip this team and and move it in a single Direction and that direction was to put out a killed virus polio vaccine as quickly as possible he very much inspired a level of loyalty and devotion in in people people had a sense that they were doing something of value that there was

a higher purpose to what they were doing and that was a tremendously powerful thing but when he was tracking down something when something needed to be done it had to be done and he really did not tolerate delays very well he had recruited two professionals were here uh Byron Bennett and Jim Lewis were were already here Jim Lewis was doing all the monkey most of the monkey work and Byron bennon was in charge of the mouse work and the preparation of all the samples that came from the monkeys we had our own animal colonies on

the second floor we had Reese's monkeys and then later on cinus monkeys and by the way we made all our own food for the monkeys that food was made in our basement in vitamins and supplements that we purchased when we were on the night shifts we knew exactly when we had one hour to go the monkeys would wake up at 6:00 a.m. and they would grab their food pans and they would clang them against the bars of their cages what a racket and we would look at each other and smile and say we have one

hour to go you know so we called it monkey time Elsie Ward did the tissue culture work and she was superb at it she could get cultures to live in transfer that other people couldn't and it she was really one of these people that she kind of talked to them she had this relationship with her tissue cultures that that nobody else did she was like a gardener the cells they were personel ities to her they were like flowers she cultivated them she nursed them she took care of them you know Elsie had the Special Touch

Jonas sulk and his team had to figure out a way to take three types of polio virus and to kill it with formaldahyde but to kill it in such a way that it could still be Juiced up to trick your immune system into producing antibodies what he showed was that if he took polio virus and and it infectious live dangerous polio virus at say a million infectious particles per per teaspoon that he could then treat it with formaly at a certain temperature at a certain level of acidity at a certain concentration of formaly and that

he could reproducibly over say three days go from a million infectious particles to one infectious particle so he would have a millionfold reduction over a period of three days he then reasoned that if he continued to do that he would have another millionfold reduction over the next 3 days and another millionfold reduction over the next 3 days so that for all intents and purposes he had completely inactivated the virus now you had to have faith in this because because although you could test to see whether there was a thousand infectious particles per dose or one

infectious particle per dose you can't really test to see whether there's one infectious particle in a million doses because you're not going to test a million [Music] doses he was challenging medical Orthodoxy all of the ordained ministers of virology said you have to have a live virus in the vaccine to stop polio and this Jonas kept saying no I think we can fake the body into manufacturing these protective antibodies by giving them killed vaccine don't have to have to worry about a a tame virus going wild again he loved the idea it's like God if

you can prevent people from getting a disease without putting them at a risk why not and it was you know there was a certain sort of Humane Spirit to it so suffered what were um two experiences that occurred in the 1930s one was made by an NYU researcher named Maurice Brody who who took brains of monkeys that were infected with polio ground them up and treated it with with formalde by doing it that way there were many poliovirus particles which sort of hid in that brain tissue and therefore he really gave children a live fully

virulent polio virus as a vaccine which obviously had a tragic result there was another researcher named John Coler who worked at at Philadelphia General Hospital who believed that you could take polio virus and weaken it with an agent called rice enolate which is derived from the castor bean plant that too was a horribly flawed concept and result resulted in a horribly flawed vaccine that twoo caused polio in some children so this was the mid 1930s and I think it casts a PA over polio research for a solid 20 years and because you knew that in

the mid1 1930s there were researchers that gave a polio vaccine that caused polio he was well aware of the early vaccine failures the first attempt with an inactivated polio vaccine killed kids so the way was clear what not to do in a sense Jonas was the one who fought all those outside battles he fought the immunization committee that was almost unanimously opposed to a killed vaccine with Sabin leading the [Music] charge Albert sabbin was the vaccine Orthodoxy I mean he had bought into the notion that the only way to make a polio vaccine or frankly

any vaccine was to take a virus and weaken it and I think he poo pooed sock because he felt that so's notion of of taking a polio virus and completely inactiv with from alide as a way to make a lifelong vaccine was ridiculous once he understood it and saw that it was right he figured well that was good enough everybody else should understand it he used to tell a story of when he was in medical school somebody saying to him damn it Suk can't you just do it the way everybody else does it um and

he couldn't it's like he he couldn't we didn't have to uh really be stimulated very much by what was going on around us because up on the third floor was the polio Ward where they had all the iron lungs all you had to do was go and look in there and you didn't need much more incentive that's a very sobering experience you know just just to have walked through all those iron lungs and the rocking beds I think were almost as impressive because to think that you just don't stop doing this all day you know

it was very sobering he saw what was needed he was aware of the suffering that was taking place he was aware of the fear he just had to get this done he did not make people think that it's tomorrow and he kept saying we have to find out how many doses to give how far apart there's a long road here yet but everybody who's pushing will will get it done faster [Music] after a while it became 7 days a week when we became convinced that we were on the verge of being able to solve this

problem from the monkey data just from the monkey data this was high high excitement I mean it was kind of took you over Jonas said at one time he felt like he was riding a horse and being whipped all the time cuz o Conor wanted to get it done get it done Jonas says we're talking about a vaccine I don't even know if we have a vaccine I'm talking about an experimental preparation o Conor say Jonas you have a vaccine and we got to use it there's no sense of saying it's 5 years away or

10 years away let's get moving and have it sooner rather than later it was was amazing even to us how rapidly things were going and how positive everything was turning out we were on a run uh that was unbelievable and would couldn't be duplicated today we never could have worked the way we did we the lab would have not passed inspection we would have had to have much more uh elaborate elaborate setup our lab conditions were relative primitive we worked on Open Lab benches and on the lab benches we put down towels which were soaked

in Mercury chloride so in case anything would drop onto them the the heavy metal and the Mercury would uh destroy the virus we didn't have lamin flow hoods we didn't wear masks we didn't wear gloves there was no plastic nothing was disposable the real volume was in what we call the kitchen where all these test tubes had to be cleaned and sterilized and I mean it it got to be the kitchen finally went to the basement and they had these huge centrifuges and all kinds of Staff down there we made a lot of our own

equipment even made special types of pipe pets to use nothing more than a rubber tubing with a filter on the end of it that you could put in your mouth and suck the TU up in the pipe pets and you suck up on it and the fluid comes up in it and then you stop it with your finger and then you put it in a test tube and lift your finger just enough until the right amount comes out I mean if you're doing mouthpipe petting with viruses you may give an extra slurp and you don't

run that virus coming in your mouth so but you got up to one point and you expelled it you know it didn't happen often that we sucked too hard if we did we just ran to the sink and tried to wash it out as best we could and hope for the next two weeks every time you have aches or pains you figure well let's see what's the incubation period of was is and when do I start feeling it but uh it's something you have to work with and that you're very careful all the [Music] time

I bump into Jesse Wright Dr Wright was the medical director at the DT Watson home and I knew that she was involved with kids and trying to restore their limbs and I says how are things going she says um clicking pretty good out our way she emphasized that and it suddenly hit me out our way that's where Suk is going to test the kids DT Watson home but I couldn't confirm it with anyone Sal wouldn't tell me Jesse Wright took a liking to me as they did at Municipal hospital I must have been one heck

of a kid but she took a liking to me and um I was one one person in the first group of polio victims who they had tried the polio vacc on to see how it would react to people had already contracted [Music] polio and then I thought oh boy this is great I'm going to get the shot I'm going to be able to run around and walk again and go play ball doctor said no it's not going to prevent what happened it's going to prevent it to happening to other people like your brother I said

fine and what he was looking for was what would happen to the antibody levels in those children who had already been exposed to that type of polio virus when they were injected with this experimental vaccine preparation he showed that you can induce the immune response that clearly was a memory response and and that broke the Orthodoxy it broke the the the Orthodoxy frankly that was established by the leading virologist of the time and and he was in that sense a good decade ahead of his time and he proved it and still people did didn't believe

it when my father saw that injecting these kids caused an increase in their antibody levels that was the moment that the whole thing was done for him he knew that it was possible to immunize humans effectively with this inactivated preparation is he nervous when he begins human testing of course he's nervous he literally goes to those places every night to see how the kids are doing but they had tremendous faith in own assault he was a father he tested the vaccine on himself he tested the vaccine on his children I asked Donna his wife she

says oh yeah he got he gives he gave the kids the shots and they screamed there's a picture of me getting a vaccination is clearly a setup shot I mean it's it's just a wonderful quintessential 50s photograph but I I'm there with a white shirt and a bow tie and my father has this arm staring intently as as was his want I mean if he was involved in a procedure it was like he was completely focused on that giving me the injection my mother is gazing admiringly at him and I'm looking at the camera with

this you know tears welling up in my eyes and my lower lip out just essentially saying can somebody get me out of here doesn't anybody know I'm here kind of kind of look I mean it wasn't fair to go ask other people to take the vaccine when we didn't take it ourselves so we vaccinated one another we vaccinated our children children before we went to the world researchers invariably tested on their own children if they have children I tested our rotavirus vaccine on my then infant son will in in 1992 for a vaccine that was

licensed in 2006 I mean and so it's not a a leap for the scientist because the scientists fully believe that this is safe and effective [Music] one of the big obstacles was to to scale up what we were doing cuz we were making Homebrew batches of vaccine and that's why pval basley was recruited because he had experience in Australia making large scale production of penicillin during the war we converted egg incubators putting stainless steel shelves in there so they put a rotator on to get the shelves moving up and down we can put our big

bottles on there to rock them he bought big jugs and big flasks whereas you know we had use test tubes and uh they figured one monkey could Supply 6,000 doses of vaccine so that was a lot and because because of the way the tissue was used and grown after sulk ran successful tests in the Watson School the March of Dimes felt that before he began his huge Public Health experiment that he was going to have to run a small study in the schools in and surrounding Pittsburgh and I think there was a tremendous Pride that

it was being done in their city with their money involving people in their Community once the word started getting around about some progress being made there was no lack of uh volunteers I mean parents were willing to turn their kids right over they were convinced long before sa this is going to work this is [Music] [Music] what is just amazing is how easy sulk found it not only to round up the 7500 kids but to round up pediatricians who are willing to give the shots nurses who are willing to stand by people who are willing

to to show for these kids back and forth record Keepers no one was being paid for this it was all done voluntarily and I think there was a sense in Pittsburgh that they were on the cusp of history people responded by the hundreds and there were accounts of people bringing their grandchildren in from out of state to get the vaccination because they wanted to make sure that they were protected Dr Sal would not tell the parents which school he was going to be at the next morning he says I want them to go to school

like they just going to class cuz then they'd be uptight all night they wouldn't sleep the parents would be anxious he says and I don't want the parents there it's easier to give a kid a shot when the parent isn't standing over the kid's shoulder well they had us lined up and they called the name and then they said it to you and you were supposed to verify it and then we were called into the area behind the screen and given a little stif bear to hold on to while we got the shot the needle

was very long and very thick looking and basically fearsome which is why I spent a lot of time squeezing the bear and looking at the windows and the Bucks it was sort of a reddish fluid I remember and I remember trying to be brave and not crying and I remember how delighted my mother was my mother used to say better you should cry than I should cry and in essence sort of said it all is this was viewed as a miracle we would help hold the children calm them down and he would talk to them

too he was very very good with children and I think he was a a comforting person that concern that relationship that joy in some sense that he took interacting one-on-one with people he really enjoyed when he got got to do that that was really a quality that he had that showed everywhere my brother Tommy uh he hated it he would try to Corner him and he'd run under tables under chairs screaming screaming his head off and he didn't care about the cookies in the orange juice he just didn't want to get a shot my sister

my oldest one was a fighter she fought them tooth and nail they had to actually put her on a prone cart and hold her down to give her the shot it turns out later that it wasn't the fear of the needle thought they were giving her polio what I had already had and she didn't want it parents were lining up their kids for a vaccine that no one could assure them was safe and no one could assure them would work but they had tremendous faith in Jonas sulk and his team they had tremendous faith in

his humanity and they had tremendous faith in his scientific ability it is is not only a national Crusade it is really it's it's a humanitarian Crusade and generations of of kids afterwards are going to benefit from this Sid said he was glad that our our kids could participate in the vaccine trials I was a nervous wreck frankly I was scared to take them and scared not to take them so I had to take them but you know we weren't sure what this whole thing was an experiment at that point the [Music] vaccine [Music] I think

with my father there were two parallel things going on complete and absolute confidence in what he was doing I don't think there was a doubt in his mind and yet at the same time there's always doubt there's always question is it going to [Applause] work as a theologist and a researcher it's interesting to watch how this plays out when you first start to work on a vaccine you're trying to understand it you're trying to understand what part of the virus makes you sick what part of the virus and induces an immune response which protects you

but not cause disease and now you think you've got it but then as I I think this is an old Chinese expression you know when the gods are really angry they grant you your wish you get your wish which is now it's going to be tested in a big phase three trial and so you hold your breath it's a tremendous leap until you put them into children you're not going to really know whether or not something is effective and frankly more importantly safe and and it's it's a testament to his courage and resolve that he

could inoculate children with something that he knew started out as live dangerous polio virus and although you can you can do studies in cells and mice you never really know that's true until you put it in people Jonah sulk for all of his self-confidence cannot possibly say that there is no chance of a kid getting polio from my vaccine vaccines are always a matter of risk versus reward and nothing is perfect nothing is [Music] perfect these are his neighbor's children he was sticking with this dead virus that's not like inoculating someone in another continent it

was very real there were children who played Little League with his sons there were you know there were children whose parents he saw walking in the streets of Squirrel Hill or in Oakland worked at the University so if he had had harmed them he would have been in a very very difficult [Music] situation Mrs Roosevelt may I present this little bottle to you as a symbol of our hope that victory over infantile paralysis is almost [Applause] here it's time America time for Walter Winchell the man who gives America the news Walter Winchell of the New

York Daily Mirror and the Washington Post on the eve of the field trials Walter Winchell opened up his broadcast mothers and fathers of America they're preparing coffins for your children because they're going to be doing this experiment on them and some of your children are going to die Walter winshell was a a yellow journalist of his time he believed as he said that the way to become famous is to throw a brick at people that are famous and that's what he did to Jonas s but I think that when Jonas s chose to make a

vaccine that was funded by the March of Dimes he signed up for being responsive to the American public and so when people raised false concerns I think it was his obligation to stand up and and fend off that concern by trying to explain science to the public not an easy thing but I do think that was his obligation and he saw that as his obligation the studies that my associates and I have been doing at the University City of Pittsburgh have indicated clearly that it is possible to induce antibody formation in children uh by suitable

injections with a kill virus vaccine uh more than that it appears that there are no harmful ill effects accompanying these inoculations that didn't hurt did it okay Conor said you have to do this in order to get your vaccine on Jonas there's certain things you need to do and again he was able and willing to do the necessary things to get things done even if it wasn't exactly in his line of work scientists are a reticent lot I mean they they they generally avoid the light they work quietly in in their rooms and try and

come up with something new s was unique in the sense that he was put forward I think by a a very large public relations group that was funded by the March of Dimes as a scientist who was going to help save our lives and and I think scientists were jealous of that when peers were critical when there was were attempts to derail what he wanted to do I imagine that he would have had a sense of aggravation and frustration but my father had a sense of what was right in nature and it was that that

he cleaved to what anyone else said whatever Dogma there was made absolutely no difference to him and I remember asking Julie youngner I says um is this safe enough Julie says hey this is like saying is the pregnant woman pregnant enough he says if it's safe it's safe if she's pregnant she's pregnant I says okay I take your word for [Laughter] it in April 1954 field Trials of the S polio vaccine begin in dozens of selected communities throughout America and the largest such test ever conducted 1,800,000 children volunteered to participate the vaccine which has Obsessed

Jonah s for years now begins to pass out of his hands when Thomas Francis was put in charge of the the field trial that would ultimately become the largest field trial of a vaccine ever performed and I think Will Remain the largest field trial of a vaccine ever performed um there was a question about how to do it can you do a trial where you give half the children say the vaccine and don't give vaccine to the other half and then watch what happens I mean Suk believed in his vaccine but the only way to

know whether it was safe was to have a group that hadn't been inoculated now Sal didn't want these controls he thought it was morally reprehensible to give some kids the vaccine and knowingly withhold it from some others the fact that he did agree to a placebo control trial was a major major Plus in the evaluation and that has become the gold standard for testing vaccines both for Effectiveness and [Music] safety in the early months of 1955 final tabulation of the S field trial results is being completed at the University of Michigan the big announcement was

going to be made on April 12th so the pitch was going up in terms of press coverage of this as a seminal event in medical history it takes a full year for the results to be analyzed everybody's nervous jonasa is confident but doesn't know no one tells him this is Tuesday April 12th 1955 a day which may well Mark the most significant event in all of medical history during the past few months the results of last year's Mass trial of Dr Jonas su's Antipolo vaccine has been evaluated the world will very soon know whether the

battle against the disease that has Twisted hundreds of thousands of young bodies has been won my father was deeply concerned when the field trial was being planned it it was decided that it was going to be necessary to add merthiolate a preservative to the vaccine whereas my father knew the polio vaccine was going to work I don't know how confident he was that this large scale field trial was going to come out with the results he had anticipated so feared that that that preservative would actually damage the vaccine viruses and render them less effective and

that really upset SA I mean he took this seriously I mean it was called the sock vaccine it wasn't just called the inactivated polio vaccine he knew his name was on it and and his heart was in it and he he didn't want to watch what he had to watch which was stand back and see the government allowing for a less effective vaccine if the results from the observed study areas are employed the vaccine could be considered to have been 60 to 80% effective against paralytic polar my litis there is however greater confidence in the

results obtained from the strictly controlled and almost identical test populations of the placebo study areas on this basis it may be suggested that vaccination was 80 to 90 80 to 90% effective against paralytic poliomyelitis and so when Jonas sa had his moment he could have stepped up there and done what Neil Armstrong did which is to say one step for for man one giant leap for mankind something obviously that was practiced jonasa had plenty of time to practice his speech he could have done that but he was so obsessed with the notion of trying to

make the best perfect vaccine that all he could talk about were ways in which the vaccine could be made better it tells you a lot about the man and I think that more than anything else tells you why he was so successful at making the vaccine because he was always Restless Never Satisfied because like any scientist he knew that there really isn't that moment moment of just sheer sort of uh joy that is unalloyed with with pain or at least unalloyed with uh with [Music] doubt the guy gets off the elevator and he hits the

the runway he never got into the room everybody is yelling give me one fing from the University Service stands up on this table and he's just throwing them give me one Lyn leor whatever his name was it works it works they were yelling there were newspaper reporters that ran to telephones to quickly get this as a front page headline on probably every newspaper in this country this was his moment it was a mob scene at an Auber I can remember that day so well television sets was set up in our school kids ran out out

into the streets school was called you know Factory whistles went off church bells told people were crying it was it was in in a way as if a war had ended and in a way a war had ended it was like it was like something just being lifted like just thought oh you know my God I just can't believe it it's over I mean it's over for millions and millions of children you can't describe it but it would just we were part of this we helped we helped we helped and everybody was of joyous and

glad Dr right the staff the staff was ecstatic after that the mail bags poured in I mean we had mail bags like you wouldn't believe letters and money and movie Office began to come in three Studios were very interested and there rumors that Marlon brandoo was going to play Jonah [Music] song [Applause] when the vaccine was declared safe potent and effective that Jonas Suk became a national hero you know he was on the cover of time Newsweek called him one of the greatest Americans he got the Congressional Medal of Freedom President Eisenhower invited him to

the White House and actually broke down few people had ever seen Ike do this he said I I just don't have the words to thank you Ike was a grandfather this is a a sign of how great medicine is and particularly How Great American medicine is at this time it is an an extraordinarily wonderful optimistic moment okay and there is reason to be [Music] proud when the vaccine became successful salt did what the best scientists do and what the most moral of them do and what the most humanitarian of them do and he said this

is a vaccine for the people you know this is not a vaccine for my personal profit and he made the famous statement you can't patent the sun the sun is for the people this vaccine is science's gift to the people it was an extraordinary [Music] act it was an absolutely extraordinary moment in time and there were so many streams that fed into this I think it really has to be remembered this wasn't the work of one person everyone else in the laboratory Dr youngner Jim Lewis Byron Bennett Val basley these people were were remarkable in

terms of their their flexibility their dedication um their willingness just to roll up their sleeves Plunge in do whatever was necessary to get this done what happened with the vaccine involved d a particular kind of optimism a particular kind of understanding and belief in science a particular kind of we have Heroes we have people who can do this and I think my dad asked himself every day of the rest of his life why can't this happen about other things why can't this happen about poverty why can't this happen about public health in a whole lot

of ways we have so many answers the sulk vaccine was unique it was unique in the sense that that it was a decision really made by the American people to try and defeat a disease and so everyone was part of this it was our vaccine and I do think it's in us I I I absolutely believe it's in us when you see moments like 911 happen or any tragedy happen our Instinct I think is always to act to act as a group and it's refreshing I think to to to see what we could do we'll

never have a public health experiment like that again for all kinds of reasons I think we would hope though that we would have moments like this again the beauty of polio was that it was a disease that could be conquered by enormous human effort I mean it is just a story of an extraordinary success a success that involved tens of thousands of Americans working really overtime to find a way to fight a horrific disease and the beauty of Jonas Suk is that he was the man who sort of crystallized this he is the people scientist

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