Chapter 10 . Summary —Polio

“The way health authorities present the story of polio creates the impression that science has figured it all out, and researchers and doctors have a very good grasp of its various characteristics–clinical, epidemiological, and virological. 

Scientific knowledge of polio, the institutional story holds, was accumulated over decades of painstaking and rigorous research carried out by thousands of researchers and physicians who dedicated their lives to fighting the disease. Building on this foundation, Salk and Sabin were able to develop the vaccines that led to the disappearance of the disease from the industrialized world (and, sometime in the near future, from the rest of the world). 

Most physicians and researchers today are only familiar with this version of polio’s history and are completely unaware of the vast body of evidence that casts serious doubt on its validity. 

The institutional story of polio presents the public with a veneer of distinguished scientific theory, but when one looks “under the hood” one discovers that its central tenets are largely based on hypotheses, speculation, and poor evidence. 

Contrary to polio’s portrayal as a “closed case” in the history of science, the door has never fully shut on polio, as the official scientific explanation is full of holes, contradictions, and mysteries which have not been resolved to this day. 

Epidemiologically, polio theory rests on Ivar Wickman, whose theory of disease distribution relied on hypothetical transmission routes between (healthy) carriers of the poliovirus. 

Recall that Wickman did not provide solid evidence to prove his theory and ignored its marked inconsistency with the national morbidity patterns in the epidemics he studied.

 The categorization of polio as a contagious disease relies, to this day, on Wickman’s shaky arguments, despite a conspicuous lack of solid evidence accumulated in the past hundred years to back it up. 

The characterization of polio as an infectious disease is based on the work of Karl Landsteiner and the researchers who followed in his footsteps. But, as we have seen, the experimental model developed by Landsteiner, which provided the blueprint for polio research for decades, never really isolated the poliovirus and was not even able to satisfactorily reconstruct the natural disease mechanism in laboratory animals. 

As a result, this model’s relevance to polio in humans was, and remains, rather dubious. 

Polio’s clinical definition is also ambiguous and imprecise. Flaccid paralysis has always been caused by numerous and varied agents, and was given dozens (or even hundreds) of different monikers in the medical literature. Physicians in the first half of the 20th century did not have tools at their disposal for accurate differential diagnosis. 

Even today, physicians are unable to diagnose polio with certainty based on the patient’s clinical symptoms or the course of the disease, and must rely on virus-detection lab tests to arbitrarily differentiate between polio and “polio-like” disease (AFP). 

The foundations of polio science are so inadequate and sketchy, despite more than a hundred years of intensive research effort, that it’s small wonder it does not provide convincing solutions to most of the mysteries and question marks surrounding the disease since it became a public health threat in the late-19th century. 

The alleged success of polio vaccines in eradicating the disease has all but eliminated scientific interest in polio theory’s numerous shortcomings and limitations. 

The vaccines “worked”, the disease was “eradicated”, and that’s all that mattered. 

But as we have seen, there are substantial reasons to doubt the role polio vaccines played in the disappearance of the disease. The Salk vaccine managed to miraculously reduce paralytic morbidity from non-polio diseases and seemingly provide herd immunity, despite its known limitations in this respect.

 Disregarding the vaunted success of the Salk vaccine in industrialized nations, most of these nations rushed to replace it with the Sabin vaccine as soon as it was approved by US health authorities, and those already vaccinated with the Salk vaccine were urged to be revaccinated at once with the new vaccine. 

The alleged success of the Sabin vaccine in eliminating the remnants of paralytic morbidity in industrialized countries contrasts with its notable failure to do so in developing countries in the early 21st century. 

Recall that while polio has almost disappeared in the developing world, the incidence of polio-like paralysis has increased by a factor of three or more during the same period. 

The story of polio also includes an important milestone in the history of vaccines: In the 1955 Cutter Incident, after the first cases of paralysis were reported in the newly vaccinated, federal US health authorities assumed responsibility for vaccination and vaccines.

 From that day onward, anything that could jeopardize vaccination efforts by damaging the public’s impression of vaccines became their business. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that these authorities have consistently and continuously withheld information about the dangers and ineffectiveness of the vaccine from the public, and sometimes even from medical professionals and scientists. 

This withholding follows a precedent that government agencies began when they concealed information about arsenic-and lead-based pesticides in food and DDT’s insufficient safety tests and potential health harms. 

Today, several decades past the point of no return, the institutional story of polio occupies such a central role in the larger myth of vaccines that the medical establishment has no interest whatsoever in reopening the closed file–or more aptly perhaps, the Pandora’s Box of polio.”

— Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth by Anonymous
https://a.co/g1BPG53

Published by Children’s Health Defence 

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