Sixty-five years ago to-day on April 12, 1955, the first polio vaccine developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk, a medical researcher and virologist at the University of Pittsburgh, was announced to the world by Salk on the 10th anniversary day of President FDR’s death. It is reported that ‘FDR was infected with polio in 1921 at the age of 39 and was left partially paralyzed’.

Jonas Salk became a national hero when he allayed the fear of polio with his vaccine, approved in 1955. Although it was the first polio vaccine, it was not to be the last; Albert Sabin introduced an oral vaccine in the 1960s that replaced Salk’s.

Science History Institute

According to this article, clinical trials using the Salk vaccine and a placebo began on nearly two million American schoolchildren in 1954. In April 1955, it was announced that “the vaccine was effective and safe, and a nationwide inoculation campaign began”.

Vaccine Development

The Science History Institute describes the Dr Jonas vaccine procedure “was to kill several strains of the virus and then inject the benign viruses into a healthy person’s bloodstream. The person’s immune system would then create antibodies designed to resist future exposure to poliomyelitis”. It further adds that “Salk conducted the first human trials on former polio patients and on himself and his family, and by 1953 was ready to announce his findings” and announced on the evening of March 25 and published in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association two days later.

According this report, there were only 42 cases of polio in 2016 and as of June 2019, the poliovirus was reported in just three countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan & Nigeria.

COVID-19 Eradication

In an opinion post in The Hill, contributor & author Jane Hampton Cook writes that vaccines & antibody therapy are required to eradicate the COVID-19 virus. In the post Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease & member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force is quoted saying:

Ultimately the show stopper will be obviously the vaccine where you can vaccinate people.

Dr Anthony Fauci, Coronavirus Task Force press conference on April 6, 2020

“In contrast to the decades-long search for the polio vaccine, Fauci hopes that a vaccine will be tested and distributed in record time, 12 to 18 months” states the post. Author Jane Cook writes that ‘unlike the Salk vaccine that inserted dead virus into the body, a COVID-19 vaccine is likely to be a DNA vaccine or an injection of engineered antibodies to the virus’.

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