Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Polio: History Doesn't Repeat, But It Rhymes

Just watched a PBS program on the history of polio in this country. Thing is, I remember many of the events shown.

Polio was a relatively rare disease, and paralysis even more so. But people were terrified of it.

I remember very well theaters and swimming pools being closed. School, however, marched right on ahead.

Salk developed a dead virus vaccine in the early 50s. This was a new concept. His rival, Sabin insisted that a dead virus vaccine wasn't a real vaccine, and that it was dangerous. Through the early 50s, Salk ran monkey trials, and was sure that his vaccine worked. He even took the vaccine himself, and gave it to his family. In 1955, Salk ran a huge human trial, vaccinating hundreds of thousands of school children.

Then a large number of children who had been vaccinated developed polio. The US Surgeon General paused the program. Turned out that the problem was a bad batch of vaccine out of Cutter Labs. After an 8 day pause, the program rolled forward again.

A few years later, Sabin's vaccine hit the market. I remember receiving that on a sugar cube in 1961.

There were a lot of parallels to our recent experience with Covid. I'm not sure we learned a lot from them.

I remember taking the sugar cube! 1962 for me

I remember getting the sugar cube. My old friend Jack’s wife died from polio.

As a kid I received both the shot and sugar cube.

I took a hit of acid on a sugar cube

and some beavis and butthead blotter too oh and some Dexter’s Laboratory too. Haha. 6 hits went thru the wash machine. Sonovabitch!!

I think I remember the sugar cube too.... Damn I'm way beyond "middle age". I clung to I'm in my "late youth" until I passed 55.

The big difference is that covid ushered in nucleic acid vaccines into the mainstream. That is a BIG difference.

I remember it as a liquid? Might have been a different vaccine.

covid has a 99.4 per cent survival and higher for children

polio has what effect on children?


did they US shut down the entire economy for 18 months during polio?

the Covid vax doesn't work but the polio does


it is hilarious to see boomers, who lived through polio epidemic ,now freak out and hide in their homes 2 years during the benign covid cold virus

I see no parallels between the two

My dad had polio when he was a kid, never quite walked right. The iron lung was another scary apparatus of the time.

What really brought Rona full circle to me, was the stories my grandmother (born in 1903) used to tell me about the Spanish Flu when I was a kid in the early 70’s. People dying alone, no room in hospitals, Except she didn’t say anyone panicked or it became a big political football.

My mom’s dad was born in 1890. He was a smallpox survivor. One of the epidemics that came thru around WWI in Texas ( maybe 1914?). He was 4F’d by the draft board in either Williamson or Milam county in 1917 as a result.

In '54 the vaccine Salk vaccine came out, but a bad batch made in California at Cutter Lab., caused polio. It caused polio in lots of children and even some deaths. They determined it was the lab, not the vaccine and in '55 they started giving the vaccines as shots. It proved to be successful in preventing polio. A man named Sabin made a modification to the Salk vaccine and that was given on the sugar cube.

These are vaccines..... they prevent the disease. The covid jab does next to nothing!

and lived through it all.

Do recall one kid that survived and had a leg brace. Also seems the disease can affect one in later life with all kinds of balance and muscular issues.

There were far more people who got polio from the vaccine than from some other means. It was about 3:1.

Trust your government. Or else. Or else, even if you do.

Bull Schit! Look at the numbers and how they dropped when the vaccine came out.

I copied and pasted this for you to read.....

Polio was once one of the most feared diseases in the U.S. In the early 1950s, before polio vaccines were available, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis each year. Following introduction of vaccines—specifically, trivalent inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) in 1955 and trivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) in 1963—the number of polio cases fell rapidly to less than 100 in the 1960s and fewer than 10 in the 1970s.

I wish the boomers DID freak out and hide in their homes, but no, we all had to mask up and use hand sanitizer 50 times a day otherwise they would get sick and it would be everyone else's fault. They wouldn't dare buy your Chinese wares if you didn't act like a leper around them....

Gen X and Millennials are the Ken and Karens that freaked out, where I live.

I got both polio vaccines.

How many of us still have a smallpox vaccination scar?

Present!