In response to any criticism of current vaccine policy, the polio vaccine inevitably gets dragged into the debate by the pro-vax side. What they don’t understand, because they’ve never bothered to find out, is that the polio vaccine, from the 50’s to the present, has a history that does not help their argument for vaccine safety. One historical tidbit left out of the discussion is that the polio virus used in the vaccines was cultivated on monkey kidneys, a process thought to be harmless at the time. It turned out not to be harmless, because the monkeys were infected with simian virus 40, and passed it on to 90 million Americans via Jonas Salk’s vaccine. SV40 is a prime suspect as the cause of mesothelioma, a fast-moving, lethal cancer that suddenly appeared sometime after 1950, one that kills around 3,000 Americans each year.
Another historical episode that never seems to make it into any discussion is the Cutter Incident, which refers to the mass vaccination campaign of 200,000 children in 1955. The problem was that the polio virus had been improperly inactivated, resulting in vaccine-induced polio in over 40,000 children, including many deaths.
Something else that is interesting: the monkeys used to culture the polio in mass quantities necessary for vaccine production were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus, similar to the human immunodeficiency virus, of which there is no documented case in a human before 1959. Vaccine scientist Hilary Koprowski conducted polio vaccine experiments in Africa between 1957 and 1960, administering his experimental vaccine to over 300,000 equatorial Africans. His vaccine was never approved. The first known case of HIV was eventually traced to a patient that visited a clinic that administered Koprowski’s experimental vaccine in 1959.
