Salk's announcement, made on CBS radio, came after tests on a small group including himself, his wife, and their children. Polio had terrorized American families for decades, filling wards with children in iron lungs. The eventual mass vaccination campaign, following further trials, would all but eliminate the disease from the United States within a decade.
By 1953, polio was one of the most feared diseases in America, striking with a randomness that spared no social class and left survivors—many of them children—paralyzed or dependent on mechanical ventilators called iron lungs for the rest of their lives. Franklin Roosevelt's own paralysis, widely (if not entirely accurately) attributed to polio, had made the disease a matter of national urgency, funded partly through the March of Dimes campaign he had championed.
Jonas Salk, working at the University of Pittsburgh, had developed a killed-virus vaccine—using inactivated poliovirus rather than a live attenuated strain, a more cautious approach than some rivals favored. His radio announcement on this day was almost startlingly informal for news of such magnitude, delivered directly to the public rather than through a medical journal first, a move that irritated some colleagues but captured the desperate public hope surrounding any potential cure.
The following year, a massive field trial involving 1.8 million children—the largest medical experiment in history to that point—confirmed the vaccine's effectiveness. Salk refused to patent it, reportedly telling Edward R. Murrow, 'Could you patent the sun?' Mass vaccination campaigns followed, and American polio cases plummeted from tens of thousands annually to near zero within a decade, one of public health's most complete victories.
Key people: Jonas Salk