Polio vaccine

Fifteen minutes on national radio

On 26 March 1953, Jonas Salk appeared on the nationwide CBS program The Scientist Speaks for Himself to discuss his team's experimental inactivated polio vaccine and its preliminary human results. The broadcast went out at 10:45 p.m. and ran about fifteen minutes.

Salk reported that vaccination had induced antibody levels comparable to those produced by natural poliovirus infection. Basil O'Connor, president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, introduced him.

Rather than announce a vaccine ready for public use, Salk explicitly warned listeners that none would be available for widespread use during the coming polio season.

The evidence was antibodies, not case counts

What Salk had that night was immunological, not epidemiological: antibody production comparable to that following natural infection.

The detailed report behind the broadcast appeared in JAMA two days later, on 28 March 1953, at pages 1081-1098 of volume 151. Salk co-authored it with Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, Elsie Ward and Julius Youngner.

Two years short of the famous one

The declaration that the vaccine was safe, effective and potent came on 12 April 1955, after Thomas Francis's independent evaluation of the 1954 national field trial.

The killed-virus approach itself was not new. Maurice Brodie had tested a formalin-inactivated polio vaccine in 1935.