As the world waited for a vaccine to end a crippling disease, here’s how Tacoma responded
The fear is still in the memory of millions of Americans: a communicable disease that could cripple a child if not outright kill them.
Polio, tied to human history for thousands of years, was the disease children and their parents dreaded.
“We thought about it a lot every summer,” said Bill Foege, 84, who grew up in the small eastern Washington town of Chewelah.
Dr. Jonas Salk’s development of the first mass-produced vaccine for polio made him a national hero. But news stories from the mid-1950s show that some of the same themes in play today over the coronavirus vaccine were active then: anxiety, hope, politics and economics.
Foege went on to attend Pacific Lutheran University and the University of Washington, pursue a career in epidemiology and head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Carter and Reagan administrations.
Foege is credited with devising the strategy that eventually eradicated small pox from the world. In 2012, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The News Tribune used newspaper clippings stored at Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room and an interview with Foege to compare the local, state and national responses to the polio vaccine with the development of the COVID-19 vaccine.
A disease as old as history
Polio causes no or mild symptoms in most of the people it infects. But in a small portion, the virus can bring paralysis and death. Ancient Egyptian stelae show even they were plagued by the debilitating disease.
Rich or poor, polio spared no one. Future U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used leg braces and wheelchairs the rest of his life after contracting the disease at age 39. Roosevelt’s case was unusual because of his age. Polio usually attacks infants and children.
Newspaper stories show Washington state was mobilizing in 1954 for an all out assault on polio.
Foege remembers going to swimming pools and theaters that would later close down following a polio outbreak.
“So there was real fear,” he said in a telephone interview from Atlanta on Christmas Eve. “Far more fear than what people seem to have with coronavirus.”
When preliminary work showed the Salk vaccine was efficacious, he wanted to skip Phase 3 trials, Foege said.
“He said, ‘I know my vaccine is good. And so it would be immoral to have a placebo group,’” Foege, who would later go on to know Salk, said. “(Virologist) Tommy Francis simply said, ‘Salk, that’s not the way science works’ and (Francis) took on the job of the field trial.”
Almost two million children throughout the U.S. were either vaccinated or given a placebo as part of the 1954 study to prove its efficacy and safety. Essentially, the same model was used to test the coronavirus vaccine this year, but with adults.
The large number of children needed for the polio vaccine study was necessary, Foege said, because only a small fraction of the children who are infected with polio develop the telltale paralysis.
In 1954, children in Kitsap, Whatcom and Yakima counties were part of that Phase 3 trial.
Even now, Foege is stunned by the large number of children recruited for the study.
“I still have trouble getting my head around it,” he said.
Health officials spent time quelling rumors and doubters of the vaccine. In April 1954, influential radio commentator and newspaper columnist Walter Winchell said the vaccine “may be a killer.”
Results of the trial weren’t available until April 1955. Even Salk didn’t know the results of the study until the day Francis presented the results at the University of Michigan.
“Local health officials anxiously awaited the results of the special federal study of the serum,” the The News Tribune reported.
“(Francis) came out and started with four words: ‘safe, potent and effective,’” Foege recalled. “That night, Edward R. Murrow took Salk to dinner and he said, ‘Young man, today you have lost your anonymity’.”
Signs thanking Salk appeared in the windows of homes and businesses across the nation.
“You could feel the relief that the population felt at that time,” Foege said.
But there were tragic setbacks. The Salk vaccine was made from dead polio viruses. A batch of vaccine made by Cutter Laboratories in April 1955 caused 40,000 cases of polio in children, paralyzed 200 of them and killed 10.
“And at this point, it became so clear how important that field trial had been,” Foege said.
Then, as now, health authorities sought to reassure the public and urged them to weigh the dangers of being unvaccinated against the disease itself. Naturally occurring polio left hundreds of U.S. children dead or paralyzed each year before the advent of the vaccine.
“If the Salk vaccine for poliomyelitis proves out, 13,000 children will be injected against the dread crippler of children here in Pierce County,” The News Tribune printed on March 20, 1955.
“Like the avenging armies of World War II poised on the shores of Britain waiting for D-Day, the forces of medicine battling polio are preparing to launch their campaign the moment they get the green light,” the newspaper declared.
Community vaccination sites were organized throughout Pierce County and doctors and nurses donated their time to staff them.
Pierce County’s first vaccination effort was scheduled to begin April 25, 1955, but was postponed due to uncertainties on the vaccine’s arrival.
Polio had “seasons” and it struck different parts of the U.S. and the world at different times. Washington was one of the last states to receive the vaccine because of its later polio season, which came in the hot summer months.
The first doses of the Salk vaccine arrived in Pierce County on May 7, 1955.
A shot in the arm
Some 30,000 first and second graders were scheduled to begin receiving the vaccine on May 16. Each child needed three shots with the second coming a week after the first and the third coming a month later.
Vaccine allocation was still not widespread by the end of 1955. On Dec. 9, a news story stated that Washington, Oregon and Alaska would share a new batch of the Salk vaccine.
It was also becoming clear that some children were falling through the cracks.
The three-shot series normally cost $10 in a doctor’s office — the equivalent of $97 in 2020 dollars.
Politics, some accused, was playing a major role in the local polio vaccine distribution. In late 1955, Dr. C. R. Fargher, director of the Tacoma Pierce-County Health Department, said Gov. Arthur Langlie’s polio committee had failed to come up with plans for future mass inoculations. He accused them of intentional stalling.
If the state didn’t come up with a plan, Fargher argued, it could lose $300,000 to $400,000 in federal money allocated to pay for the vaccination.
Fargher was concerned that children who had gotten the first two shots would miss the third and final booster shot. He was also concerned about children from lower income families who were not on welfare but still too poor to afford the vaccine.
“It’s pretty hard for families of limited income to pay $10 for each of their children,” Fargher told The News Tribune.
By the end of 1955, more than 1,300 children from low-income families had received free polio shots.
In 1961, an oral vaccine was developed and quickly overtook the injection as the preferred inoculation method.
As polio became a relic of the past in the U.S., it persisted inside developing countries well into the 1980s. Aggressive worldwide eradication programs were enacted.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, polio is endemic even today. The disease has been eradicated in the Western Hemisphere since 1991 when a three-year-old Peruvian boy became the last known person to contract polio.
‘Incredible’ vaccine, ‘miserable’ response
Foege calls the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccines “absolutely incredible.”
“To take just a slice of the RNA, and be able to insert it and get the right kind of antibody response is just beyond comprehension for me,” he said.
“The science was at the right place,” Foege said. “The fear was at the right place in certain areas.”
But the government response was lacking, he said.
Previous disease eradication efforts provided lasting lessons for governments and the public, Foege said.
“And almost every one of those lessons has been violated,” he said.
The most basic, he said: “You have to know the truth if you’re going to actually do something.”
In October, a letter he wrote to current CDC director Robert Redfield was leaked to USA Today. In it, Foege urged Redfield to publicly resist and expose the Trump administration’s efforts to meddle with the CDC’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Months after the letter was written, Foege hasn’t changed his opinion.
“The response in this country has been absolutely miserable,” he said.
This story was originally published January 4, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
