THE POLIO VACCINE PIONEER

Karen's Polio Test, Olathe, KS

THE POLIO VACCINE PIONEER

 I spent the afternoon sorting items from my wife Karen’s childhood including some scrapbooks that contained all manner of things that a young girl would consider important in her life at the time.  I kept a scrapbook which contained clippings of the scorecards from my illustrious bantam baseball career that were religiously published in the Emporia Gazette.  I scuttled it years ago when I realized that these faded clippings were no longer relevant to my life. 

Karen’s collection included early crayon artwork, holiday cards, scattered school photos that were passed out at year’s end, playbills from school performances (some bearing her maiden name for various roles), napkins from special dinners or vacations, etc.  It occurred to me that most of these items we kept in our youth reinforced our enthusiasm and growth towards adulthood but really didn’t have much use as we moved along in life.

And then I came across a surprising May 13, 1954 article in The Olathe Mirror newspaper that caught my attention, as the world is now in the midst of testing and inoculating everyone for the COVID-19 virus. The lead in to the front-page photos stated that “second grade children of Johnson County schools will receive this week their second inoculation of the vaccine which may open the way for the control of paralytic polio.”  In the photo Karen was documented as the first girl to receive the shot at Central school and told her classmates waiting their turn in the corridor, “Didn’t hurt a bit.”

The phrase “may open the way” caught my attention so I did a bit of researching on the web.  I found that president FDR contracted polio in 1921 which left him paralyzed.  In 1938 he helped create the March of Dimes which enlisted the star power of celebrities from Mickey Rooney to Mickey Mouse.  A neighbor boy that I played with contracted polio and was in an iron lung until he actually recovered.  So, polio got personal.  There was no vaccine to stop it. 

Polls taken in the years following WWII revealed that the only thing Americans feared more than polio was nuclear war.  The current coronavirus pandemic primarily affects older adults while the poliovirus attacks children.  It arrived each summer ultimately closing swimming pools, movie theaters, birthday parties, etc.  I remember people lining Commercial Street from block to block with dimes placed on wooden boards to finance research.

Then in 1952 a little-known scientist named Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburg developed a “killed-virus” vaccine by growing samples of the virus and then deactivating them by adding formaldehyde so that they could no longer reproduce.  This tricked the immune system into manufacturing protective antibodies.  He then tested his vaccine on thousands of monkeys, then children at two Pittsburg institutions and then his entire family. 

I found an article that stated “on April 26, 1954, six-year-old Randy Kerr was injected with the Salk vaccine at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. By the end of June, an unprecedented 1.8 million people, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, joined him in becoming “polio pioneers.”  In April 1955, it was announced that the vaccine was effective and safe, and a nationwide inoculation campaign began.

And then it finally struck me!  My wife Karen and her second-grade schoolmates were inoculated in May 1954 in the southern Kansas City suburbs.  That was just after the first child was vaccinated and before the vaccine was approved for public use.  She was one of the initial Polio Pioneers that led to the suppression of the dreaded poliovirus pandemic!

She never mentioned it and I would have never discovered it if I hadn’t taken the time to read a faded, long-forgotten newspaper article with her second grade photo.