- Person
- Jonas Salk
- Lived
- 1914–1995
- Field
- Medicine
- From
- American
The story
Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was only useful if it reached people. Having declined to patent it so that it could spread as widely as possible, he spent the decades that followed arguing that protecting children through vaccination was a duty shared by the whole society.
Salk campaigned vigorously for mandatory vaccination throughout his life, calling the universal vaccination of children against disease a moral commitment. He saw vaccines not only as a scientific achievement but as a public good that should reach every family, rich or poor. He believed people had to accept prudent risks for the sake of progress, warning that a risk-free society would become a dead-end society.
His view was borne out by results. After the vaccine was licensed in 1955, mass immunisation campaigns promoted by the March of Dimes cut annual US polio cases from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957 and just 161 by 1961. By 1959 Salk's vaccine had reached about 90 countries. Less than 25 years after its release, domestic transmission of polio had been eliminated in the United States; the last cases caused by wild virus spreading within the country occurred in 1979.
The same principle now underpins childhood vaccination programmes around the world. The World Health Organization recommends that all children be fully vaccinated against polio, and a global eradication effort led by the WHO, UNICEF and the Rotary Foundation began in 1988. Together, Salk's injected vaccine and Albert Sabin's oral vaccine have cut reported cases from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 33 in 2018. Polio was eliminated in the Americas by 1994 and in Europe by 2002, and India was declared polio-free in 2014.
Salk did not live to see the end of polio, but the goal he argued for, a vaccine reaching every child, is the strategy that has brought the disease to the brink of eradication.
Why it matters
Salk's advocacy helped establish routine childhood vaccination as a cornerstone of modern public health.
About Jonas Salk
Virologist who developed the first successful polio vaccine; refused to patent it, calling the breakthrough a gift to the world.
More about Jonas Salk
- Jonas Salk chose not to patent the polio vaccineAsked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, Jonas Salk answered: 'Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?'
- Jonas Salk founded the Salk Institute in 1963In 1963 Jonas Salk opened the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, a research centre designed by architect Louis Kahn.
- Salk helped develop a flu vaccine for the US ArmyBefore polio, Jonas Salk worked with Thomas Francis Jr. at the University of Michigan on an army-commissioned influenza vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases.
- Salk's vaccine was tested in a trial of 1.8 million childrenThe 1954 field trial of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine involved over 1.8 million schoolchildren, 20,000 physicians and 220,000 volunteers. The children were called Polio Pioneers.
- Salk spent his final years seeking an AIDS vaccineFrom the mid-1980s until his death in 1995, Jonas Salk worked on a vaccine and immune therapy against HIV, applying the killed-virus approach he had used against polio.
- Salk tested his polio vaccine on himself and his familyBefore the national trial, Jonas Salk gave his killed-virus polio vaccine to volunteers including himself, his wife and their children. All developed antibodies with no ill effects.
- Salk's vaccine cut US polio cases from 45,000 to 910On 12 April 1955 Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was declared safe and effective. US polio cases fell from an average of over 45,000 a year to 910 by 1962.
Sources
- Jonas Salk Wikipedia
- About Jonas Salk Salk Institute for Biological Studies
- Polio vaccine Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.