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A hero to many. Legitimate hero that people fawned over for generations
Some (our very own Seacrest) question his contributions. Let's settle it right here.
This version from Wikipedia seems to be the commonly held belief
Test results announced[edit]
On April 12, 1955, Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr., of the University of Michigan, the monitor of the test results, "declared the vaccine to be safe and effective." The announcement was made at the University of Michigan, exactly 10 years to the day after the death of President Roosevelt. Five hundred people, including 150 press, radio, and television reporters, filled the room; 16 television and newsreel cameras stood on a long platform at the back; and 54,000 physicians, sitting in movie theaters across the country, watched the broadcast on closed-circuit television. Eli Lilly and Company paid $250,000 to broadcast the event. Americans turned on their radios to hear the details, department stores set up loudspeakers, and judges suspended trials so that everyone in the courtroom could hear. Europeans listened on the Voice of America. Paul Offit writes about the event:
Shopkeeper expresses a nation's gratitude for Dr. Salk's discovery (13 April 1955).
"The presentation was numbing, but the results were clear: the vaccine worked. Inside the auditorium Americans tearfully and joyfully embraced the results. By the time Thomas Francis stepped down from the podium, church bells were ringing across the country, factories were observing moments of silence, synagogues and churches were holding prayer meetings, and parents and teachers were weeping. One shopkeeper painted a sign on his window: Thank you, Dr. Salk. 'It was as if a war had ended', one observer recalled."[31]:56
"The report", wrote The New York Times, "was a medical classic." Dr. Francis reported that the vaccinations had been 80 to 90 percent effective on the basis of results in eleven states. Overall, the vaccine was administered to over 440,000 children in forty-four states, three Canadian provinces and in Helsinki, Finland,[4] and the final report required the evaluation of 144,000,000 separate items of information. After the announcement, when asked whether the effectiveness of the vaccine could be improved, Salk said, "Theoretically, the new 1955 vaccines and vaccination procedures may lead to 100 percent protection from paralysis of all those vaccinated."[35]
The nation celebrates[edit]
Dr. Jonas Salk receiving a Gold Medal from President Eisenhower (27 January 1956).
Salk’s new vaccine was by transformed by Alan John Beale’s team, based in Glaxo, England into something which could be manufactured on the enormous scale which the widespread threat of poliomyelitis required. Within minutes of Francis's declaration that the vaccine was safe and effective, the news of the event was carried coast to coast by wire services, radio and television newscasts. According to Debbie Bookchin, "across the nation there were spontaneous celebrations... business came to a halt as the news spread. The mayor of New York City interrupted a city council meeting to announce the news, adding, 'I think we are all quite proud that Dr. Salk is a graduate of City College.'"[9]:46 "By the next morning", writes Bookchin, "politicians around the country were falling over themselves trying to figure out ways they could congratulate Salk, with several suggesting special medals and honors be awarded.... In the Eisenhower White House, plans were already afoot to present Salk a special presidential medal designating him "a benefactor of mankind" in a Rose Garden ceremony.
It was also declared "a victory for the whole nation." Jonas Salk became "world famous overnight and was showered with awards", writes O'Neill. The governor of Pennsylvania had a medal struck, and the state legislature gave him a chaired professorship. However, New York City could not get him to accept a ticker tape parade. Instead New York created eight "Jonas Salk Scholarships" for future medical students. He received a Presidential Citation, the nation's first Congressional Medal for Distinguished Civilian Service, and a large number of honorary degrees and related honors.[2]:138
According to O'Neill, "April 12th had almost become a national holiday: people observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes, kept their red lights red in brief periods of tribute, took the rest of the day off, closed their schools or convoked fervid assemblies therein, drank toasts, hugged children, attended church, smiled at strangers, and forgave enemies."[2]:138
By July, movie studios were already fighting for the motion-picture rights to his film biography. Twentieth Century-Fox began writing a screenplay and Warner Brothers filed a claim to the title The Triumph of Dr. Jonas Salk shortly after the formal announcement of the vaccine.[36]
Global acceptance and hope[edit]
Six months before Salk's announcement, optimism and hope were so widespread that the Polio Fund in the U.S. had already contracted to purchase enough of the Salk vaccine to immunize 9,000,000 children and pregnant women the following year.[37] And around the world, the official news prompted an immediate international rush to vaccinate. Medical historian Debbie Bookchin writes, "Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium all announced plans to either immediately begin polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine or to gear up to quickly do so. "Overnight", she adds, "Salk had become an international hero and a household name. His vaccine was a modern medical miracle."[9]:47 Because Salk was the first to prove that a killed-virus could prevent polio, medical historian Paul Offit wrote in 2007 that "for this observation alone, Salk should have been awarded the Nobel Prize.[31] Virologist Isabel Morgan had earlier shown and published that a killed-virus could prevent polio, although she did not test her vaccines on humans. Morgan's work, nonetheless, was a key link in the chain of progress toward the killed-virus polio vaccine for humans later developed and tested by Salk.
By the summer of 1957, over two years later, 100 million doses had been distributed throughout the United States and "reported complications following their administration have been remarkably rare", noted the scientists at the International Polio Conference in Geneva. Scientists from other nations reported similar experiences: Denmark, for example, "reported only a few sporadic cases among the 2,500,000 ... who received the vaccine." Australia reported virtually no polio during her past summer season.[38]
Other countries where the vaccine was not yet in use suffered continued epidemics, however. In 1957, Hungary, for example, reported a severe epidemic requiring emergency international assistance. By the first half of the year, it had 713 reported cases and a death rate of 6.6%, and the peak infection months of summer were still ahead. Canada sent a shipment of vaccine to Hungary by a refrigerated plane, and Britain and Sweden sent iron lungs. A few years later, during a polio outbreak in Canada, "masked bandits" stole 75,000 Salk vaccine shots from a Montreal university research center.[39]
Worldwide eradication successes and failures[edit]
By the end of 1990, it was estimated that 500,000 annual cases worldwide of paralysis resulting from polio had been prevented due to immunization programs carried out by WHO, UNICEF, and many other organizations, and in 1991, transmission of polio was declared as "interrupted" in the Western hemisphere.
In developing countries, estimates in 1988 ran as high as 350,000 cases each year.[40] As a result, in 2002, more than 500 million children were immunized in 93 countries,[20]:112 and by December 2002, there were only 1,924 cases worldwide, mostly in India,[41] with six other countries where polio was still endemic: Afghanistan, Egypt, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Somalia.[42] By early 2014, however, the World Health Organization (WHO) listed only three remaining countries where polio was still endemic, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, and declared Pakistan's city of Peshawar as the world's "largest reservoir," of polio.[43] Some groups have attributed Pakistan's high numbers, in part, to the fact that because the CIA conducted a fake polio campaign to help track Osama bin Laden in May 2011, religious extremists can create fear that the vaccine is actually a western conspiracy to sterilise the population.[44][45]
China
In 1993, China initiated a national immunization program, with over 80 million children getting vaccinated in just 2 days; by the following year, the country reported only 5 cases of polio.[46]
India
In 1981, India reported over 38,000 cases of polio. By 1999, intensive vaccination campaigns had succeeded in eradicating the Type 2 strain of virus from India. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates sponsored a campaign to eradicate polio, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed nearly $1 billion to health and development projects throughout India.[47] The last case of polio in India, in two-year-old Rukhsaar Khatoon, was confirmed on 13 January 2011. India was removed from the list of polio-endemic countries in 2012, and marked two years without a case of polio on 13 January 2013.[48] As no new cases were found by January, 2014, the nation was officially declared polio-free.[41]
Africa
In 2003, after an outbreak in Nigeria, international organizations spent $10 million to vaccinate 15 million children in Nigeria and neighboring countries.[20]:112
Latin America
During the 1970s, Latin America had an estimated 15,000 paralysis cases, with about 1,750 deaths each year from polio. By 1991, the last case of polio was reported in Latin America and the Caribbean, and polio has now been declared as fully eliminated from the region.[49]
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