I sympathize with the views expressed by Winter Coop and others who are looking for certainty in dealing with this virus that is entirely new to humans. I'd love to have certainty that covid vaccines are 100% safe, too.
Have you ever heard of polio? Since 1979, no
cases of polio have originated in the U.S. and that is because of the polio vaccine, which started out as a nationwide experiment and was the first of its kind of vaccine. Many unselfish and patriotic families allowed their children to be injected because they were so eager to avoid suffering from polio.
You can read the fascinating story of that experiment here.
A nationwide trial of an experimental vaccine using school children as virtual guinea pigs would be unthinkable in the United States today.
But that's exactly what happened in 1954 when frantic American parents -- looking for anything that could beat back the horror of polio -- offered up more than 1.8 million children to serve as test subjects. They included 600,000 kids who would be injected with either a new polio vaccine or a placebo.
Equally remarkable, the Salk polio vaccine trial stands as the largest peacetime mobilization of volunteers in American history, requiring the efforts of 325,000 doctors, nurses, educators and private citizens -- with no money from federal grants or pharmaceutical companies. The results were tracked by volunteers using pencils and paper.
And it lasted just one year, with officials hopeful at the outset that they would be able to begin giving the vaccine to children within weeks of the final results.
"
I can't imagine what the disease would be today that could get that many parents to sign up their children for an experimental vaccine trial," said Daniel Wilson, a history professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., who has written three books on the history of polio in the United States and is himself a polio survivor. "I think it's a measure of how much people feared polio that
mothers and fathers were willing to accept the word of researchers that the vaccine was safe."
Then, just one year after the trial started, the National Foundation announced the results: The Salk vaccine proved 80 to 90 percent effective in preventing polio. And by 1961, the rate of polio had dropped by 96 percent in the United States, thanks to the Salk vaccine.