The Dark Side of Polio Vaccine Testing

Introduction

Polio vaccines are hailed as a heroic development in medicine and science. However, there is a dark side that is less acknowledged, at least in the media accounts of the polio vaccine. This is the abuse of disabled people – specifically disabled children in institutions – by vaccine testers.

How the Sausage was Made

Most polio vaccine development took place using monkeys. Jonas Salk, who created the inactivated polio vaccines, used rhesus monkeys imported from India extensively. In fact, this import of monkeys was a minor industry. This testing had involved infecting multiple monkeys with the virus, particularly when Salk had been involved in attempting to discover the amount of different strains of poliovirus. It also involved extraction of the monkey kidney tissue, in order to create a cell culture to grow the virus to create the vaccine. It was required to keep killing monkeys to gather this tissue because immortal cell lines, such as the HeLa line (an immoral exercise in lack of informed consent and medical racism in itself) had not yet been created when the polio vaccine was being developed. This cell line would only come to be used in a limited way during the testing phase.

However, Salk and other vaccine testers needed to move their vaccine testing from primates to humans, before the full scale testing that would take place among the general child population. For this exercise, they selected children in institutions as the first target for human vaccine testing. As quoted in the article Between Simians and Cell Lines:

The transition from experiments with imported non-human primates to trials with ‘normal’ American children was conceptually bridged via the testing of institutionalised disabled humans deemed non-normal.

Let’s take a closer look at the three main vaccine developers at this time, Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, and Hilary Koprowski, and how they used disabled children in their vaccine experiments.

Jonas Salk

Jonas Salk, while testing his inactivated polio vaccine, carried out two rounds of testing on disabled children. He carried out work at the D T Watson Home for Crippled Children and the Polk State School. This testing took place in 1952, prior to the main testing of the Salk vaccine in 1954:

At Polk, Salk first inoculated children who were already polio victims with a vaccine derived from the same virus type present in their blood to assess their immune response. Following this, he vaccinated other children who had not previously contracted polio and who lacked protective antibodies.

There is no even hypothetical benefit to these children if they had already had polio.

Albert Sabin

Albert Sabin, in contrast to Salk, developed a live attenuated virus polio vaccine. When he wanted to test his vaccine, he applied to carry out an experiment at the Willowbrook institution. Willowbrook was a home for disabled children notorious for abuse and other unethical experiments, primarily hepatitis experiments. It was exposed in the 1970s by investigative journalist Geraldo Rivera.

However Sabin’s application to test his vaccine there was refused, and he turned to prisoners to test his vaccine instead.

Hilary Koprowski

Hilary Koprowski is the least well-known of the three main polio vaccine developers in the 1950s. This is because his vaccine was not adopted. However, it was extensively used in some parts of Africa, particularly the then Belgian Congo around Leopoldville (modern Kinshasa).

Koprowski, like Sabin, believed only a live vaccine would be effective against polio. He thus worked on creating attenuated strains of the poliovirus.

In 1950, he gave the first live polio vaccine to a human being at Letchworth – a home for people with intellectual disabilities. In the articles published about the vaccine testing, the children given the vaccine were referred to as ‘volunteers’. One of these children had to be fed the vaccine via a stomach tube.

While working on further attenuated viral strains, he created his most notable polio vaccine strain, known as CHAT. He created this vaccine strain by attenuation the virus in various cell lines. However, he then used the disabled children at Sonoma institution to create the vaccine strain itself, by passing the attenuated vaccine strain via four children and extracting the virus from fecal matter. He called the vaccine CHAT, according to him, because it was a truncation of Charleton, who was the last child used in the creation of the strain.

He conducted further trials at Sonoma in 1955, including those to see whether his attenuated vaccine strains would spread to non- vaccinees. As stated on page 221 of Edward Hooper’s book, The River:

In the course of these he and Tom Norton, assisted by a phalanx of nurses, had conducted two contact experiments, in one of which a group of six children who had been fed SM [one of Koprowski’s strains] and who were excreting virus in their stools were kept “in very intimate contact” with another eight children who lacked Type 1 antibodies. In practice, this meant that for the next twenty days the children (all of whom were incontinent) were allowed to play together for three hours a day on a plastic mat, which, although it was washed down to prevent its becoming grossly soiled, was deliberately not disinfected. In the course of the experiment, three of the unvaccinated children became infected with Type 1 virus.

Conclusion

Disabled children in institutions were an easy and convenient source of ‘raw material’ for vaccine testers. All three polio vaccine ‘pioneers’ tried to test their vaccines at disabled institutions and two actually did so.