February 23, 1954

Polio vaccine

Salk polio-vaccine public-school pilot begins in Pittsburgh

137 children at one Pittsburgh elementary school, injected by Salk himself. They had walked into an experiment, not a vaccination clinic — the vaccine would not be licensed until April 1955.

Arsenal Elementary, Lawrenceville

On 23 February 1954, at Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood, 137 children received injections of Jonas Salk's experimental inactivated poliovirus vaccine. Salk gave the injections himself.

The children were research participants receiving an unlicensed preparation. Earlier human and community studies had shown the killed-virus vaccine could produce antibodies without causing polio; this school program was meant to add safety and immune-response evidence.

The immediate question at Arsenal was whether the preparation was safe enough to test nationwide.

Neither the first shots nor the big trial

"First mass vaccination" is definition-dependent. Salk had already tested the vaccine on human subjects in 1952–53, including institutionalized children, research staff and volunteer families.

Nor was this the opening day of the nationwide Francis field trial, which is what the phrase usually evokes. That trial began separately on 26 April 1954 at Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia.

The Pittsburgh pilot and the national study were related but distinct.

What Pittsburgh actually established

The pilot expanded to additional schools. By April, safety results from 7,500 Pittsburgh children helped persuade the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to approve the far larger national trial.

That trial enrolled more than 1.8 million children and supplied the comparative dataset behind Thomas Francis's announcement on 12 April 1955 that the vaccine was safe, effective and potent.

Pittsburgh's contribution was safety data; efficacy came from Francis's separate study.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The 23 February date for the Arsenal Elementary inoculations is well supported.
The label “first mass vaccination” is definition-dependent. Salk had already tested the vaccine on human subjects in 1952–53, including institutionalized children, research staff and volunteer families.
This was Pittsburgh’s public-school pilot, not the start of the nationwide Francis field trial. The national trial began on 26 April 1954 at Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia.