The AIDS Vaccine Impasse: Lessons from Jonas Salk and the March of Dimes (Draft)

p. 2
campaign of the independent, private National Foundation for Infantile
Paralysis. Created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the foundation
was driven by the goal to stop the epidemic as soon as possible, led by
its accept-no-noes-for-answers director and FDR's former law partner,
Basil O'Connor.
By 1949, virologists supported by the March of Dimes had cultivated
the polio virus in test tubes without using allergy-producing nervous
system cells, a critical step necessary to make a vaccine. Acting on the
discovery, and outside of the formal task assigned him by the March of
Dimes, Jonas Salk began quietly to develop a "killed" polio vaccine by
applying existing techniques of virus inactivation used in influenza
vaccine.
But Albert B. Sabin -- one of the most brilliant scientists of his
generation -- and many establishment [ Dlete BSTALISiM NT word?
S ubstie aioter ajecie? virologists at the time were absolutely
certain that successful vaccines for viral diseases required living but
weakened virus strains, and Sabin's would not be ready for years. They
opposed Salk's vaccine strategy for lacking sufficient basis in science,
and were upset by O'Connor's adoption of it and his encouragement of Salk
to use the press to promote and defend it before the public. Sabin argued
publically and maneuvered to try to stop field trials of the Salk vaccine.
Fortunately, O'Connor was not dissuaded by the skepticism, and
accepted alternative advice to proceed. His March of Dimes organization
put the Salk vaccine to the test among more than half a million children
just in time for the summer polio "season" of 1954. An independent