Cool People Who Did Cool StuffPart Two: How We Beat Polio But Not the Mythmaking Around Jonas Salk
Margaret talks with Anney Reese about how a group of people made polio vaccines and ended polio but how one guy took all the credit and ruined our understanding of history.
Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to the show that you already know the name of the title of because you clicked on it. I'm your host, Marto Kiljoy and I have a guest, and my guest is Annie Reese.
Hey, Anny Reese, Yes, Hello, I'm so happy to be here, happy to be back.
Thanks. On this day, that's totally a different day than the previous day. Definitely, yeah, because this is live. People don't know that because it's not true. But Annie Reese is a podcaster and is the host of saver, a food podcast. Although now you know that it actually isn't a different day. If it was two days from now, I would have now listened to savor ye because it sounds really up my alley, but I didn't because actually we only recorded part one about five minutes ago.
So you're revealing how the sausage gets made.
I know, Terrible is really just giving them all the secrets. It's okay, like the fact we have a secret producer never introduced before. Never Sophie Lichterman.
Hehy, are you, Sophie. I'm all right.
I lost my voice last week, so it's like slightly scratchy still.
Any particular reason or just for fun.
I just was like, man, I don't need it anymore.
It's fine, Yeah, you don't, like you don't work in audio.
So I was like, fuck it, I don't need that thing.
You know. It's like now these days, you get a cold and then your voice is like slightly different for several months. Yeah, And I have a bunch of audio books I have to record, and then I keep being like, oh, I'm gonna put it off until my voice gets back to normal, and then I'm like I don't know what normal is anymore.
And recording an audiobook, I've only done one, but it's a whole thing. It's annoying, it is, and it's like, why don't you just for five hours not mispronounce anything?
Yeah, because every time you do, you have to click on your computer and go back.
Yeah. And then you're reading the stuff you've written, and then you're like, maybe I should have I wish I had known I had to read this aloud.
You know, but this is revealing more information about you than I previously knew. Oh no, what was the book that you read?
Well, stuff I've never told you has a book?
And do you do the audiobook?
Yes? We did so Samantha McVeigh, who has been a guest on the show before. She is my wondrous co host and a great friend of mine. We read it together, but foolishly we didn't realize we were going to have to do the audiobook, and so we were sitting there next to each other just bewildered, like, oh gosh, I would not have written this if I had known. But she was a great support throughout the whole thing. So shout out to having supportive friends who help you get through something like reading an audiobook for five hours that can be very intense. Yeah.
I always do that alone in a closet, So like, that's pretty good.
Yeah, the subject matter was a little deep, so I was like, this is yeah, yeah, yeah, but check it out. It's good.
Well. Also, we have an audio engineer named Eva.
Hi Eva hi Eva hi Eva.
And our theme music was written for us Beyond Woman, and this is part two about well, it's gonna be a lot of parts about the things that the government's trying to take away from us. And this was going to be a glorious episode about how purely amazing the polio vaccine is. And then it got more interesting and fun when I found out that the person who gets called the destroyer of polio was not that, but was interesting and strange. And so we are telling the story of Jonas Salk, the man who was part of a large project and then gets whatever you've already heard me complain about this. So he is just start to do some flu vaccine stuff. He's not actually the one who you know, he's not in charge of this project, but he's part of it. And students at the university start getting vaccinated too, and so fewer of them were getting sick. Soon after that, they started studying how to put multiple strains of flu into the one vaccine. But there's a problem with this, right, If you put a whole lot of different flu into a vaccine, it starts being like, well, that's a lot of stuff in one shot, right, And people started experimenting with what are called adjuvants, which is what you can add to boost a vaccine's immunological response without upping the viral load. It's basically stuff that's like magnifying. It feels like a video game to me, where you're like, oh, if you have this thing, it like works really well with this other thing, and it like boosts the thing.
You know, Yeah, kind of like D and D. Yeah, you can get exactly.
Yes, I would argue that anyone who's played D and D who's anti vax didn't play D and D. I cannot imagine being like, you want a plus one shield and you're like, oh no, it doesn't make you completely safe forever. So I don't want to plus one shield and you're like, who are you? Why are you playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I just feel like I need more of the science. I need to do my own research, and I'm just going to run into this battle without. I don't need that. I don't.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
You're like, all right, you went up a level. Do you want all the new powers that come with the upper level. I'm like, uh, that's like the way that the man wanted the dungeon master told me to do that. I don't. I don't trust that person.
I don't trust that at all.
Yeah. So, when you read about Sulk, you read about how people loved him, but scientists hated him. And if you read something a bit more of one of these hagiographies as most writing about him, is the reason that scientists hated him is that he bucked the trends. He was a maverick who refused to play by the rules or whatever. If you read more critical writing about him is that he was attention seeking, risk taking idea, taking credit for eing, and kind of mercenary and reckless about that mercenary part of it. He pissed off his colleagues a lot while they're working on the flu shot because he made a deal with a pharmaceutical company, Park Davison Company, to give them exclusive vaccine information in exchange for royalties for the sale of the vaccine. This pissed off Francis, the person heading up the project, and they I don't think they ever rekindle their friendship.
The bridge burned, Yeah sounds like yeah.
I lose track of the number of bridges he burned. It might be that they reconnected with this particular person later, but I don't believe so. And it's presented as like and then after that, he just wanted to be more independent in his research, and I'm like, no, he probably got a run out for being a capitalist dick bag. He's like, I want to be more independent in my research. So he moved to Pittsburgh and became the director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh's Medical School. This is not a prestigious appointment. It is in a forty by forty foot basement that is sometimes used as a morgue when they need overflow morge space. Originally, he was just going to work on the flu and measles and the common cold, but he was recruited by an organization called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which is this massive nonprofit fundraising organization. This is basically the like Polio group. It was founded by FDR, the most famous polio victim in the world, and FDR put his weight behind it and they ran a fundraising campaign which is actually still around called the March of Dimes. And this started when a bunch of Hollywood stars asked people to mail a dime to the White House, and that you know the inherent thought of this, I mean, it's mostly the thing that the government should just do anyway. But the idea is that this would help pay for the cost of treatment for polio patients, which basically no one could afford. It was incredibly expensive to take care of a polio patient and there's no health insurance really at this point, and like, it's hard to imagine a war system than we currently have. But that's where they were this organization. I think eighty million people donated to this, which is like, I don't know what the population of the US it was in nineteen thirty whatever. I assume it's about eighty million people. I don't know.
I also am stuck in my like modern brain where I'm like, the cost of mailing a.
Die Oh yeah, totally like that. I guess the equivalent would be like mailing a dollar now, which still kind of barely works out.
Yeah. Hey, it sounds like a lot of people got into it.
I know.
Also, you're like not supposed to mail cash anymore, and that change.
Oh that's interesting, Okay.
And so the president founded this organization, but the guy who ran this organization, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, very specifically didn't want the government to be the one funding polio research because if the government funds medical research, communism wins. No, we can't have that.
Let all those kids die, you know, you know, not communism though.
Yeah, yeah, And so it's about private fundraising, getting everyone to donate. There's a word for getting everyone in the country to donate to something. It's called taxes.
Yep, yep.
So Sulk in the Pittsburgh Research Center, they're like, all right, we're gonna fucking do this. We're gonna cure polio, or rather, we're gonna stop polio. And there was a lot of work involved in this, and not just like try stuff out and see what works, but rather grunt labor of typing a ton of different strains of polio. There's three strains, and then within each strain there's just like a whole bunch of types that are a little sub guys, only two had been typed before. And it is long, slow, boring work that kills an incredible number of monkeys and has to be done incredibly attentively. So Sulk and his team started killing those monkeys. That's not the way I want to phrase it. They started doing that work. Crucially, they are building on the work of a lot of people before them, and the work that a lot of their peers at other research institutions are still doing. The old way of typing polio. The style at the time involved okay, you get a lab monkey and you give it inoculations of a known type, and so then it has like the one polio antibodies, right, and then you extract the monkey's blood, you combine it with an unknown type of polio, and then you inject it back into the brain of an uninfected monkey. If the monkey doesn't get sick, then the unknown type is similar to the type that the inoculated monkey at antibioties against, right, Because you're like, ah, well it was protected against this, you know, right, folks, Maybe Salk I'm honestly suspicious of the shit I read that talks him up at this point and attributes various inventions to him. He figured out that you could use mineral oil to make a smaller amount of a virus cause a larger antibody response. That thing I talked about earlier that I forget the name of it, and it didn't write down on my script the word I'd never heard before and couldn't pronounce. By using mineral oil, Salk's team figured out that they could reduce the number of monkeys who had to die in order to isolate each type of polio. Previously, each type took forty monkeys. Now they could do it with only fifteen monnkeys. That is a saving of twenty five monkeys and if you want to save well, I guess it's not really time for an ad break, but that would have been so good. Just imagine the.
Ads just do it early.
Yeah, fuck it, here's the ads. Save some monkeys, save your own monkeys by spending other monkeys' lives on our goods and services.
There you go, no rules here, some but not a lot.
Here they go and we're back. So they're doing this work. And this is like the grunt labor of making a vaccine, because you just like have to isolate every single known type of polio. A man named Julius Jungner was on Salk's team and was responsible for a lot of the advancements that Sulk essentially took credit for. Julius had worked on the Manhattan Project, so he was familiar with his work having a seemingly positive end to some people and a great deal of complicated. And why I don't even see as complicated. It as bad that we dropped nukes on cities full of innocent people. But you know whatever, I can imagine during World War two being like, we better develop this before the Nazis do. I could see doing that, right, you know. He worked on that, and then he moved to the University of Pittsburgh and he developed a color test to determine how much virus is in tissue, and this made the whole thing go faster. He also figured out how to grow the virus in large quantities, which is more or less the thing that made the vaccine possible. As best as I can understand, most of the rest of what Sulk's team did was building on existing work and then just doing the work. Like people were like, oh, we got to a menapolio vaccine. These are the steps that are necessary, right because people had already done the how are we going to do this part? Except how are we going to get a ton of poliovirus? So Julius Jungner is the one who figures that out as far as they can tell, and because you need a ton of poliovirus if you want to inoculate the entire country and or the entire world. He kept running up against the scientific establishment like he would run up against the Committee on Typing, who kept saying that like, no, none of us want to change how we do things, and you need to stop being different, is the way it is often presented, or they had legitimate reasons against the stuff that these people were doing, but people don't want to write about that because they want to write about a hero. Salkin's team kind of just did it anyway on the side, and to be fair, they were probably right in this particular circumstance. They typed seventy four strains of polio in a year in what was expected to take three years, and they seemed to do it right. It wasn't like about shortcuts. It was about like finding better systems by which to do it. And the committee was like, all right, fine, you always all right, good enough. Twenty thousand monkeys died to type polio and you're making a face of the who seems.
Like, no, oh my gosh, twenty thousand monkeys, it's terrible. Let me. I know. It's interesting hearing this story now because we've had so many developments since then, for good and for bad, and some of them have, you know, skewed us away from animal testing, but not always. But also I find this whole hero story of Sock really interesting because the parallels of what we're seeing now of the anti vax movement is very much it feels in line with what he was all about right, which is like, no science establishment for me. I'm gonna do this, And so it's strange to have.
These He's a move fast and brain things guy.
But he was doing it four vaccines, and now we have it against vaccines.
I know, as I'm writing this, I'm like, man, if RFK didn't hate this guy, you'd probably love this guy exactly, like, yeah, it's a trip. So twenty thousand monkeys die, which is less than it would have been without some developments that they made. I don't know. I don't know to do math like that. I try not to. And there were and are three broad types of polio, types one, two, and three, which is fairly easy to remember how many there are. Type one is eighty percent of cases, and then types two and three are about ten percent of cases each. Type two is almost entirely benign, Type three is the deadliest, and type one is the typical paralytic one that we talked about. Fortunately for our researchers, there just wasn't a ton of variants in polo like influenza, so it was a very good candidate for vaccines. When people started growing polio on purpose, they grew it in the nervous systems of human fetuses dead ones in the nineteen thirties. By nineteen forty nine, some folks in Boston managed to grow it onto other human tissue like skin and muscle and kidney, and that got other people the Nobel Prize. In nineteen fifty four. People are like, how come Salk never got a Nobel Prize? But this is the only Nobel Prize for polio that happened. Is that people figure how to grow it on different tissue. And Saul was like, all right, that's a good idea, and so he grew it in monkey tissue, a mix of testes and kidneys. This might have been the part that was Yogner's idea. That's my combining two different sources is to come with my own conjecture. Now they can bulk make polio, and they understand the types of polio, and so it's just time to start doing it. They pick the most antibody producing strains of each type of polio and not coincidentally, also the most dangerous, and then they use formaldehyde to quote unquote kill the virus. More technically, this inactivates the virus. Sulk was fantastically good at science communication. This is maybe the one thing you can't really take away from him. He was good at explaining ideas to a broad audience. Which is funny though, because then I read a whole bunch of excerpts of one of his later biophilosophy books, and I'm like, no, this is incredibly badly written. Like it is like comically badly written.
Do you think people were just talking him up? Or was it like a thing of the time.
I think he was good on camera, and his biophilosophy books are later he basically win that out right. He's like high on his own supply, and he's like, I do whatever I want. I'm a biophilosopher. Now what is that? And he's like, let me tell you, And they're like, I wish I had never asked. I'm so sorry. He spent more and more time in the limelight, talking to newspapers and radio audiences and bringing photographers into the lab, which is no longer a forty by forty basement, it is several floors and thousands of square feet. June nineteen fifty two was the worst outbreak of polio and human history so far. I would have just said in human history, but you know, we have the future to look forward to now, and Salk has something of a vaccine in the works, so they started limited testing. So he headed on out to the DT Watson Home for Crippled Children to test the vaccine on polio victims. This time parents were asked for consent. I mean, I think he's just kids for consent, but you know, at least progress is being made along consent lines. The kids would not be helped in any way by this, because like, if you test a vaccine on people who've never gotten the disease, at least if it works, they are now vaccinated, right, But these kids have already gotten polio. It is a good way to test for antibodies and side effects, and it's basically the kids like helping science at some risk to themselves, but not great risk to themselves. No one had adverse effects, and all of them got more antibodies. So then he tested on crippled children without polio. This is the way it was phrased at the time, and this sounds awful, but it makes some sense. If you test this on someone who's already not able to use their limbs, if they accidentally get polio, they're less likely to get worse than they already are. This could still kill them, though all twenty seven in the second trial were fine. Then they tested the kid's blood on monkey kidney cells and that worked too. Then he worked on sixty three kids with mental disabate, which the justification that salkas is that they are already isolated from society and illness, so they haven't been as exposed to illness, so they're a blank slate, and they have a lot of health records. Not all of these kids have parents who could consent, but don't worry. The state's Department of Welfare provided that consent.
No, I'm a little worried.
Yeah, no, I'm wanted to and to be fair and or this is what the people who write really glowing things about him say. He worried like hell as he did this, he said of doing these trials. Quote, when you inoculate children with a polio vaccine for the first time, you don't sleep well for two or three weeks. And like he probably said that, and he probably meant it. Like everything I've read about him, he is aware of the human impacts of what he's doing and sees it as a greater good thing. But he's not callous about it, you know. Yeah, he's maybe a little cavalier.
He sounds like a I'm trying to wrap my mind around. He feels like the science version of Oh, I want to be remembered. I want to do this great thing totally. I want to be known for this in the history books.
He talks about that shit constantly.
Yeah, he has that vibe, which can be very I don't care how many monkeys have to die. I'm in the kids I have to experiment on. But at the same time, it also sounds like it wasn't all about I just want to be remembered. He actually did want to get to this vaccine. Yeah.
I think at the end of the day, his goal was to cure polio, not to become rich and famous, like.
Which makes it all the more complicated.
Yeah. Yeah, and like, this is what it took to save so many millions of children's lives. You know, this doesn't mean that was the way that it should have been done or had to have been done, but it is the way that it was done. Right in the children's hospitals, he had incredible bedside manner. He would laugh at the kids, he would talk through their fears he would answer questions. And I think this does matter because part of the evil dystopia of like doctor's non consent whatever is the like they're just gonna ignore you. You're just there, you're just meet you know, I said earlier, this is the style of how it's done. At the time. When he presented his findings in nineteen fifty three to the Committee on Immunization, they were like, you did fucking what hold up? Yeah, And then the whole thing leaked to the press, and I wouldn't Maybe someone does know and has written about who leaked it to the press. I don't know. I leaned towards this man leaking it towards the press. I didn't lean towards that when I wrote this script, but I like, as I learned more, the whole thing leaked to the press, that the polio vaccine was almost ready. It didn't leak to the press like testing on children. It was hey, we think we have a polio vaccine, which is true. They did think they had a polio vaccine because they did have a polio vaccine. So we talked to the press and he was like, Hey, I'm actually just cautiously optimistic and the press was like hooray, we're saved. And they called it the Salk vaccine, and he was like, please don't call it that. But I don't know whether he was actually like, please don't call it that, or if he was like, oh no, please don't call it the Sulk vaccine. My middle name, by the way, is Edward, you know, like I just don't write. And people are mad at him in the scientific world, and Jonas E. Salk is getting called Jonas E. Christ by the people who are mad at him.
Interesting.
Some reports say he hated the public life. Some say he reveled in it. I don't fucking know.
Jonahs E. Christ, I know, which.
Is funny because actually when he was a little kid and he kept talking about He's gonna save everyone, people used to call him like something like Jonas Christ or something like that. And it's like a really funny nickname to give a Jewish kid too, you know.
Right, yes, pretty good. And then he got the added middle name that was given to you.
Yeah. At this point, totally wonderful father in law. So at this point, the figure they might be ready for broader trials. The public needs this vaccine, and there are two groups that are opposed to this public trial. One had a point the people who support his direct competitor, Albert Sabin, who was convinced that the dead virus vaccine is dangerous. Saulk was using the most virulent type one strain, so if any remained active formaldehyde didn't kill at all, the patient would die. And formaldehyde in act activation was not particularly well studied at this time, and there was no evidence that the dead virus approach would lead to lasting immunity. Sabin was pushing for a live virus oral vaccine, but that comes later, and then you've got early anti vaxers.
Woo.
A celebrity entertainment journalist, a podcaster of his day was this guy, Walter Winshell. Apparently he's one of the originators of the news's entertainment in radio and TV, and he stirred up mass hysteria about how the vaccine was going to kill all the school children. In response to the Sok was like, I just vaccinated myself and all my children, which is true. And so in nineteen fifty four they have the first big clinical trial. It is the largest clinical trial in history up to that point in the US. One point five million kids were in the test. Six hundred thousand of them got the vaccine. It was a series of three shots, and the trial was a massive success. And here's a chunk of like the thousands and thousands of people left out of this story who did a ton of work? Is that coordinating this thing was a public health undertaking on an incredible level because you are tracking all of those one point five million people, and you're doing it like more or less before computers. Like people did a lot of work.
Yeah, and for three shots, Oh gosh.
Yeah, I think it's like one shot and then a month later, and then there's one shot a week later, and then a month later.
Yeah.
I think the most accurate headline I saw about this was from an obituary of Sulk that this isn't the polio vaccine that eradicated polio, but it was the polio vaccine that quote turned the tide against polio. Jonas Salk gave this big speech in nineteen fifty five when they announced the test results that it worked, the vaccine worked, we were going to stop polio. He thanked a ton of people. He did not think his team.
Or anyone on it, what are god interesting?
Ah huh? They all left crying.
Oh that's sad. He got up there and he was like, you're welcome.
It was all me, Yeah, totally.
And you keep waiting for your name, you know, or some kind of recognition.
Yeah, this person usually working side by side with who's like kind of already taking credit for your work, and you're like, ah, but now he's going to say my name at least finally. Yeah, right, never comes Youngner, the guy who had actually invented a lot of the important shit, said about this moment quote people really held it against him that he had grand standard like that and really done the most uncollegial thing that you can imagine. Jonah Sulk, for his part, never apologized for this and only spoke with Younger again once in their lives.
Do we know how this meeting went?
I don't. I wish I did. Younger like later was like, I mean, he would say all kinds of shit about what had happened, but he would still also kind of a team player, where he didn't try and tear down the vaccine and even Younger's coming out of this looking good. Younger had even more damning stuff to say about Salk, though. When you read about the incidents of vaccines mishaps right, which are like things that fuel anti vaccentiment today. There was something called the Cutter incident. There was a pharmaceutical company called Cutter. Because we live in this weird country where everything has to be done through all these private corporations, there's a bunch of different companies doing the vaccines, right, and so the Salk vaccine is made by a lot of different places, and this one pharmaceutical company, Cutter, wasn't inactivating the virus effectively. This killed eleven people because it caused the numbers in front of me anymore about a thousand people to get polio. Younger had seen the problems at the Cutter laboratories factory and told Sulk about them, and then Sulk, as far as Younger can tell, didn't do anything about it, because that still happened. It's still like went forward and people got the Cutter vaccine and people died. And then in an interview Sulk went on, I think it was TV, and he was like, you know, I wouldn't pat in this vaccine because quote, how can you pat in the sun? What a guy? Right? Well, sure, it turns out he and his team had been looking into patenting it, but their attorney told them they didn't have a chance in hell of successfully pattenting it because it was built on prior work. It was not a new invention.
Don't you love it when someone's like, oh, I never would have done that, Yeah, and then you find out later they definitely tried to do it.
Yeah, totally. This is like one of the main things that is like held up as like this whenever there's like a fucking meme level like Instagram post about Salk and the polio vaccine or whatever it's like. And he refused to patent it because how can you patent the sun? You know, you're like, well, their attorney had just told him, quote, if there were any patentable novelty to be found in this phase, it would lie within an extremely narrow scope and be of doubtful value.
Doubtful value.
One guy Da Henderson, who's another like public health virus researcher. Guy. I almost fell down another rabbit hole about him, and then I didn't. He has successfully fought smallpox, he put it. Quote. Jonas came in at this point with pretty much everything done except for moving on to wider scale human trials. This vaccine helped a lot. It is a good vaccine. It is what I got as a kid. Probably it is probably what you, dear listener got as a kid if you were raised in America. The rollout was uneven at the time, According to an article in the MIT Technology Review written by Angela Matsayak in two thousand and five, quote, by nineteen sixty, less than one third of the population under forty years of age had received the full course of three doses of the Salk vaccine plus a booster. Most of those who had were white and from middle and upper economic classes. The disease raged on in urban areas among African Americans and Puerto Ricans, and in certain rural locales among Native Americans and members of isolated religious groups. Angela also says quote. While Salk's vaccine did slow down the incidents of polio among middle class Americans, its cost and its requirement of three in jactions and a booster meant that for years the disease continued to affect the poor and others lacking access to proper medical care. It was only after Albert Sabin's oral vaccine, which was cheap, effective and easy to administer, was licensed for production in nineteen sixty two that polio could be fully controlled in the United States. So there's another problem too, right, They've just developed this new vaccine, not the new new one, but the AsSalt one. But America was so afraid of communism that it couldn't be a public campaign of vaccination. It had to come from the nonprofit, and that nonprofit, the Anti Communist Org that sponsored the whole thing, had a total of nine million shots available. That was not nearly enough. Everyone needed at least three or four. But what they did need was products and services, because that's how you really defeat communism is products and or services, of which there are none in countries that are not the United States of America. Obviously famously, that's why we don't need to do global trade anymore, and we all can buy iPhones that were made in America.
It's just clear.
Yeah, I don't see any problem with any of this, and if I did, I'd be a trader. And I'm anyway, whatever, here's a bunch of ads, and we're back. If I ever come back to this topic, it'll be to do a deeper dive on Albert Sabin and the vaccine that defeated polio worldwide. The thing I thought I was writing about when I got biographies about fucking anyway. But this was my eleventh hour surprise during my research. So Albert Sabin he was born Abram Sepperstein in nineteen eighteen in the now Polish city of Bali, stock Well. It was always Polish, but it was part of the Russian Empire. And when he came to the States in nineteen thirty or so with his parents, they anglicized his name. He became Albert Saven. He spent World War Two traveling all over the world helping develop vaccines against the insect born diseases that soldiers were getting. He basically like did all the stuff that people claimed Sock did.
Yeah, it's like sock is the even though the inverse in terms of the timeline, he's basically like the inspiration for socks, like the movie character you see, Yeah, at least the one that was actually out there too.
Yeah, And he wanted a live vaccine for polio, and some of this was like he just sort of believed in the axiom that dead vaccines don't solve viral problems or whatever, right, But all public support for his vaccine disappeared because the Salk vaccine dropped even though it didn't eradicate polio, because it wasn't able to be rolled out enough. So he started collaborating internationally because he couldn't get support in the United States. Famously, anyone who listens to the show knows that I'm not a big USSR person. The mass testing for the vaccine that eradicated polio happened in the USSR. Salk and Sobin were actually both invited to the USSR, but Salk didn't go and Sabin did. So one hundred million people in the USSR were part of those trials from nineteen fifty five to nineteen sixty one. And it worked. So you have this oral vaccine and it uses a live virus. Because it's a live virus, it creates a stronger immune response and gives longer lasting protection. You don't need needles to administer it. They put it on a sugarcue. This is where the whole spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Thing. Apparently like it was like a reference to this, Oh, I don't know I read that, but I'm like, I'm like, nah, But apparently you don't need boosters. You just need a sugar cube. And because it's live, it's contagious, but in a good way. You get vaccinated, Like they give you a fucking sugar cube, you eat it, and then you go home to your town or village or whatever, and you spread antibodies naturally, and everyone you spread it to is now immune topolio two. There is a downside to this. There's a reason that we use the dead vaccine here in the United States. A few people die every now and then. I've read eight to ten people around the world per year, but I've also read that it's not every year, and it's fewer people than that. I don't know. Basically, like this is getting an administered to millions of people every year, an eight to ten or so of them die, and the people who die, they do so because occasionally, incredibly rarely, the virus mutates and becomes active and you have an outbreak, which is then solved by administering a vaccine. The perfect solution to polio that the World Health Organization suggests is that you use both. You use the sabin vaccine first, and it creates actual herd immunity. Herd immunity is not the word for let everyone get sick. It's the word for get everyone antibodies. Use the Sabin vaccine and eradicate wild polio. Then you switch over to the Salk vaccine to keep it dead. It just costs more money to do it this way. That's what happened in the US is that they use Salk's vaccine for a little while, but it didn't really do enough, and so then people are like, how come the Commis get the good American vaccine and we don't get the good American vaccine. So then they started using the Sabin vaccine, and then once wild polio was eradicated, they switched back over to the Salk vaccine. When I was like, Savin did all the same stuff Sock did, but like kind of, Actually, Sabin also tested the vaccine on himself and his family, and he also didn't patent it, And there isn't as much information about him not patenting it that I'm able to find, but it seems as though he would have made about seven billion dollars if he had patented this. What instead he lived off of a teacher's salary for his entire life.
I want to be like good for him. But I also like, I hope, I hope that was purposeful. I believe it was Okay. Well, then good for him.
He wrote, quote A lot of people insisted that I should patent the vaccine, but I didn't want to do that. It's my gift to all the world's children. And he worked with Cuba in nineteen sixty two as Castro's Cuba was the first country to actually get They were like, they were like, all right, we're going to actually commit to getting rid of polio. And I believe that they were the first country to succeed. But while Sabin's vaccine defeated polio around the world, America liked its doctor rock star, and Sulk remained the darling of the press and the political establishment. His wife divorced him for quote extreme cruelty.
Oh whoa. I was going to ask you earlier if you thought that they had any love for each other.
And now, now, as best as I can tell, it sounds abusive. It sounds emotionally abusive, even though he was the one who had been like, come on, come on, don't you want to get married. Come on, I don't have a middle name. Give me a middle name. You know. He was just constantly. His work was his life, and he like loved being famous, and he was like, oh, the pretty girls like me. You know. Yeah, the thing I it implies that both of them were cheating on each other, But the thing I read implies it in a way that's kind of like blaming her and then being like, I guess he did it too, And I'm like, man, I wonder who fucking did it more? The fucking rock star anyway, whatever agreed, So he's like ignoring her. He's like choosing where they live, constantly ignoring. She's got three kids with them, and she's not having it anymore. That's like the nicest version. They never really talked about it, and so when she says extreme cruelty, it probably means the sort of patterns of emotional abuse. But I don't know, that's the nicest thing I can picture there.
You know.
Donna, his now ex wife, stays committed to leftist activism, but he's at this point, first sort of a political and then increasingly into sort of a mystical eugenics, although a weirdly maybe leftist mystical eugenics. I don't know, I'll get into it a second. He remarries to a woman who also dated Paba Picasso. He wrote a bunch of books about this biophilosophy stuff he did, where he's all about like, just like we can understand viruses and bacteria, we can understand the humans, which like a very normal thing to think. And he wrote a book called Survival of the Wisest. Oh no, if that name sounds sketchy, it's because the book is sketchy. I've read excerpts, and I've read analysis, and I've also it's really fun to read both the goodreads reviews and the archive dot org reviews, because there's a hick copy of that on archive dot org and it is more or less calling for the genocide of the stupid. Like one analysis I read was like, this is just a book length thing where he's avoiding using that word, where he continues to say like, well, the wisest people should develop a new morality as they inherit the earth. In it, he writes, quote, if the quality of human life is to improve, a process of selet both natural and human will have to choose the wisest for positions of influence and power. Eventually, the struggling in the human domain will be between the wise and the non wise. This implies that those who lead others in ways that are anti evolutionary or that are being counter to the natural process of becoming the being and the and the being is capitalized like the t but then being is all capitalized. I just want everyone to know that aalk outs okay, will either be replaced by others possessing wisdom akin to that of nature capital and in nature, etc. Etc. You see what I mean where I'm like, but this man isn't a good writer. Like when people are like, he's a really good science communicator, I'm like, well, he's not a good philosophy communicator.
No. And to very oversimplify what I'm picking up here is this was a very early version of you know, nerds will inherit the earth like. He wanted power. He wanted power, and this was his way of being this scientist rock star. I can be the powerful one. I'm wise, it seems, don't particularly care if I have to run perhaps on ethical tests on mentally disabled people. Yeah, but it's just very interesting to me because it feels very loud in him being like I'm the one with the power, and totally that's what we should be placing it on is wisdom totally?
Like, how is he defining wisdom in this context?
Exactly because it is true, Like you said, I'm all about wisdom. Oh yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, but it just feels very he's placing it in terms of he wanted more power.
Yeah, how they were going to do all this eugenic shit once they had power is that they would build RNA viruses with which to reprogram humans in the embryo.
No, I know, no, no im media, no from me.
All right, well then never mind. I was going to pitch our new biophilosophy podcast on cool Zone Media, but apparently that's.
A no, No, it's out.
I liked a review that was written on archive dot org about this. There's a five star review quote a must read for anyone interested in the thought process of a Malthusian psychopath. It is troubling to think that this man invented inoculations that were administered on a large scale.
But it was five stars.
Yeah, I mean, like it's like half ironic, but it's like yeah, no, it's like a it's a very useful book with which to understand this particular genre of like okay, and what's interesting Again, I haven't read this book yet. Most people talking about it are aware, they're like, this is bad, right, But there's like some people who are kind of like wellness influencer types who are like, oh, this book is like so good to help us understanding overpopulation and you know, how to be our best selves and and all of this stuff. You know, So I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually crops up as like a new thing the right gloms onto. But I think again, I haven't read the whole thing yet. I haven't read more than excerps yet. One of the things that he wants to get rid of is diseases, both of the like susceptibility to whatever things that are bad and eugenics to try and cut out, but also diseases like prejudice and like bigotry. And so he's like, oh, we're going to eugenically get rid of racism. Is I think what he's saying.
Wow, again, that's a real that's a mind fuck. To be honest with you, I know, that's just like the opposite of eugenics. I don't know.
I know, theoretically he'd be accidentally programming his own ideas out of existence if he did this right. The other thing that people say about him, Okay, when people paint the simple picture of Sulk, that is technically true, but not is here is this man who dedicated his life to trying to make the world better, defeated polio, and then, when he was well past retirement age, spent the rest of his life up until his death, trying to make a vaccine for AIDS. And that is true. He spent the end of his life trying to create a vaccine for AIDS. Once again, he trusted it enough that he inoculated himself in nineteen eighty seven. I'm not mad at him for trying any of this stuff. Despite some early promising animal test results, he never succeeded. His dead virus approached. Didn't hurt anyone, but it didn't make anyone better either. Albert Sabin died in nineteen ninety three. Jonas Edward Salk died in nineteen ninety five. Yeah, we had our first polio outbreak in the US since nineteen seventy nine in the year twenty twenty two, and one of rfk's advisors, this guy named Aaron Siri, tried to get the FDA to unapprove the polio vaccine, so good luck everyone.
Yeah, it's really bad. I mean the FDA chose the guy to lead like the vaccine's division essentially at the FDA is this guy named doctor Vine Prosad and like friend of the pod doctor Cavajda, and I.
We fucking hate this guy. Sucks.
He spent all of the pandemic trying to get people not to get vaccinated. He's like a scream into.
The void YouTube guy.
And he's not the guy that's in charge of the vaccines division, which is so crazy.
It's so crazy.
It's like this being monstrously bad at math, Like take the live polio vaccine. If it kills eight people every year, that's like not what we want a vaccine to do. Yeah, right, if you have a ninety percent chance of dying or a nine percent chance of dying, you pick the nine percent chance of dying because it's a lot better. Yes, you are so much safer. I was trying to explain this to like one of my friends who kind of went off of terrible direction during COVID sure, who didn't want to take the vaccine, like, well, we don't know what it does, And I'm like, but we do know what COVID does, right, So do you take the door that one hundred percent has a monster behind it? Or do you take the door that point zero one percent has a monster behind it? Like that is really easy math.
It sure is the other thing that I you know, I've pointed out. It's like it would be like if they appointed me to make like basketball decisions for the Boston Celtics, who.
I hate with a fiery pack.
It's like, you can't assign a hater to be in charge of the thing that they hate. Like that doesn't make sense. Like this guy spent all of COVID and after it's still just like shitting on vaccines.
And they were like, that's the guy.
Yeah, that's what we need. More vaccine skepticism, More skepticism of the thing that has successfully destroyed the scariest disease to Americans in nineteen fifty four.
We're currently working on our project that's going to come out probably in May on he could happen here. That's about what's going on with measles in Texas. Oh sure, that'll be like an n entire week project that we're working on with a local journalist out there. That kind of explains a little bit about like how we got to the skepticism a.
Little bit more.
M hmm.
And I think people should listen to that. When we drop it, it's gonna be really good.
When I was doing this research, there was a there's a moment in nineteen seventy six, we're actually both Sabin and Salk were both talking with the President during a swine flu outbreak. That thing that Annie Reese currently.
Has survivor Oh okay, yeah.
Is contagious for it forever, and everyone needs to make any a pariah. No, none of that's true.
None of that's true.
But if you could get people to follow that six foot rule again, oh my gosh.
Yeah, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
It would be only for me, though, wouldn't it.
Yeah, I know I would feel better that you had that boundary because I missed that boundary every day.
In nineteen seventy six, people thought there was gonna be a really bad swine flu outbreak, and so they did a lot of work trying to vaccinate, and like both Sabin and Salk, I believe were part of this process of trying to get everyone to get a flu vaccine that year, and there was like a like one in one hundred thousand incident of an increased potential risk of like one particular thing or something. And then the swine flu didn't really hit and so everyone was like, ah, see it is bad, and people sometimes present it as the beginning of the modern anti vax movement. But then I was reading other stuff that was like, no, that actually isn't where there's no continuity there. It all comes back to that stupid fake autism study.
Yeah, and I do think there's a lot of very it feels distinctly American to me. But I just feel like people got so pissed off that we were telling them like you can't leave, you've gotta wear a mask, Like we were giving them all these rules. Yeah, and instead of thinking of that herd immunity of like the health for everyone, people were just angry that they couldn't do what they wanted to do, and then they were isolated. They were going on these rabbit holes that were telling them like it's all a lie, it's five G it's.
Just yeah, instead of just realizing that, like you know, I'm telling you I miss some of the COVID or some I'm like, yeah, I wish you would wear a mask on an airplane.
You're in a fucking airless metal tube. A chewa, chew a chew. Cough cough, cop Come on, I wish somebody would wear a mask. Six foot rule miss you curb.
Side pick up?
Oh my god? Oh yeah, but.
Really the six foot thing, I'm like people used to like give you like I loved it, and now it's like you're in my bubble well.
I often have people stay about six feet away from me right now. In order to accomplish that, you have to wear all black and be it like kind of strange trans girl.
Yeah.
As people travel and stuff, it's like we're you're often the only person on a plane wearing a mask, which is so baffling to me when.
I think about the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, where like the new technology of cover your mouth when you cough. We look back and we're like, ha ha, they didn't know that we should have taken.
Wearing a mask on a plane.
Bring a mask when you go to a hospital or to a doctor's office.
Or somewhere where you know that you're going to be in a crowd space what an idea?
Yeah, and just as a social norm, there's no one who's going to I don't know. Maybe actually some things do need to be mandate, I'm not sure. But overall, no one's going to arrest you if you just cough into the air, right, but it sure is a faux pas and it should be right. And like, I don't know, I don't have solutions here around how public health should be run. I am not enough of an expert. I don't I genuinely don't think people should listen to podcasters around public health. I think they should listen to people who study it. But people should wear masks sometimes, and people should sneeze into their crook of their elbow and learn that hand sanitizer doesn't stop fecal oral transmission. And you know, love that some stuff.
I love how much you love that story.
I know, Well, it's manny too, because it's the kind of thing that doesn't really impact people who don't live lives like I do. But if you go to like like a forest defense camp, you have like everyone goes in poops in a we call it a shitter, you know, and in order to it's safely, it's a certain distance away from the kitchen. You have to cover everything, you have to dig a certain depth. You know. It's all this work that people do. And people used to just put some hand sanitizer there. Yeah, but thanks to the work of people explaining how transmission.
Works, that doesn't help.
Yeah, So instead you have to build this thing out of five gallon buckets and a foot pump where you can like pump soapy water. And you know, people have like solved this problem. And it's one of these things where it's like, this is a reasonably normal part of my life. It is not a normal part of most people I know's lives. An outhouse is not a part of like most of my friend's lives. But for many years lived somewhere where an outhouse was the only toilet available, you know. Yeah, anyway, Annie, how you feel that about salk and seven and polio in the future?
You know, the future? Uh? You know, Honestly, I feel like I say this every time I come on a show like this. I have a million thoughts and I want to talk about all of them. Like you said, there's a lot of paths we could have gone down, but currently it's just it was interesting to hear how displayed out in the past, and to juxtapose it with how it's going yeah right now in some frightening ways. But yeah, just the kind of it sounds like there's always been this po politicization of vaccines and who gets the credit for them? Yeah, and then are they actually any good for you?
Yeah, all that stuff, and the answer is yes, vaccines are great, one of the best technologies I've ever developed. And also all the stuff that they're trying to strip away from social services that are trying to take out all the good parts of the government and leave all the bad parts of the government. And what we need to do is the opposite. Imagine that you should get rid of the bad things and keep the good things. Just got it all backwards, that's the problem.
And you know, wash your hands, cup your mouth when your cough, and maybe just like thinking, am.
I too close to that person? Maybe I am?
Yeah, And don't talk to cops.
Don't fucking talk to cops anyway.
Well, anywhere can people follow you?
People can find me on podcasts stuff when never told you and the podcast Savor wherever you get your podcasts.
And that is Savor without a you. Yeah, not that people would assume there's a U and savor unless they're from Turf Island. But anyway, Hi everyone and bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
