Word: salk
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During last year's ruckus over the safety and distribution of the Salk polio vaccine, the man responsible for bringing order to the confused and emotional situation was Dr. Leonard Andrew Scheele. As Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, he was doctor to the U.S. people, and it was his job to insist on the priority of scientific precautions over political speed. This brought him into unhappy conflict with the then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Oveta Gulp Hobby. A quiet career man for two decades, Scheele became increasingly aware that the hazards of public service...
...famed Pasteur Institute of Paris put on sale 6,000 series (three shots each) of a modified Salk anti-polio vaccine, found the situation in France diametrically opposite to that in the U.S.: supply far exceeds demand. One reason is that polio is much less common in France; so is the wherewithal to buy the vaccine, which costs $7.15 for the three shots...
...jampacked session on Navy Pier, four experts led by Vaccinventor Jonas Salk pronounced a favorable verdict. One year and 40 million inoculations after the initial flurry of accidents, controversy and fumbling, the vaccine has been vindicated. Said Dr. Salk in an unwontedly cautious, indirect statement: "Inferences that the theoretical considerations were unsound or were not applicable . . . seem not to have been supported by time...
Surgeon General Leonard Scheele of the U.S. Public Health Service happily backed up Salk's rebuttal to his nowsilenced critics (the most vociferous were not even invited to appear on the program). Since May of last year, when Scheele imposed stricter controls to guard against faulty vaccine, "there has been no ... evidence that any lot of [commercial] vaccine has been unsafe." From the millions of shots given to date, no more than one "suspicious" polio attack has come out of each big lot - a figure, according to Scheele, "well within the limit of expected coincidence...
Eventually, every U.S. child can expect polio immunization, reported Dr. Salk. If properly administered, he said, the vaccine would give close to 100% protection against paralytic polio. In a 1955-56 study of 4,167 children, he found that only 4.8% had sufficient polio antibodies before vaccination. After the first shot, 43% had protection against all three polio virus types. After the third dose, administered a year later, 98.5% were found to have three-way immunity. Salk emphasized his prescription of a three-shot schedule: two shots two to six weeks apart, and the third about seven months later...