Iron lungs line up at the Ranchos Los Amigos Respiratory Center circa 1950.
Bettmann via Getty Images
A lawyer advising Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine.
Before vaccines were available in 1955, polio caused 15,000 cases of paralysis in the US each year.
The US eliminated the disease in 1979, but unvaccinated travelers can still carry polio in.
Some health experts are concerned that polio could make a comeback in the US.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Donald Trump's nominee for health secretary. Aaron Siri, a lawyer advising Kennedy, has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the current polio vaccine, The New York Times reported.
Kennedy has said he doesn't plan to revoke any vaccines as health secretary, though some worry about his ties with Siri.
Polio vaccines helped eliminate the disease from the US in 1979. Doctors warn that pausing vaccinations would help the disease regain a foothold in the US.
“We would have big outbreaks of polio,” Walter Orenstein, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's immunization programs in the 1980s and 1990s, told The New York Times.
In the 1950s, cases of poliovirus ran rampant in the US. Hospitals overflowed with disabled or severely ill patients, according to the National Library of Medicine.
Here are 23 historic photos illustrating the impact of the disease and the distribution of vaccines.
A virus that affects nerves in the spinal cord or brain stem causes polio.
A young girl using an abacus in a bed at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, circa 1950.
Douglas Grundy/Three Lions/Getty Images
Polio mainly affects children under the age of five. Most people only have mild symptoms, but one in 200 cases causes irreversible paralysis. Between 5% and 10% of paralyzed patients die when muscles used for breathing can no longer move, according to the World Health Organization.
The US had several polio epidemics in the 20th century, including in 1916 and 1937.
A doctor removes special casts to examine the a polio patient's legs in 1916.
Bettmann via Getty Images
Polio was first identified in 1909, though it had been around for centuries, and the US had a serious outbreak in 1916, which started in New York.
At the time, doctors understood very little about the disease, including how to treat and prevent it.
An estimated 6,000 people died and 21,000 had resulting paralysis from the 1916 outbreak.
There were a series of polio outbreaks in the 1940s and 1950s.
Two-month-old Martha Ann Murray is watched over by a nurse in an iron lung in 1952.
AP Photo
The number of polio cases rose from eight per 100,000 in 1944 to 37 per 100,000 in 1952, according to Yale Medical Magazine. During that period, about 60,000 children were contracting the disease each year.
There was an increase in people over the age of 10 getting the virus, too.
Treatments for polio included hot wool and physical therapy.
Larry Becker draws a hospital floor plan using his right foot in 1955.
AP Photo
Early on, some doctors would put patients in full-body casts, which could make paralysis permanent.
Roosevelt sought relief by taking dips in Georgia's warm springs.
During a 1940s polio outbreak, the Hickory Emergency Infantile Paralysis Hospital in North Carolina tried treating patients with boiled wool “hot packs” for the skin and physical therapy.
Patients with severe cases lived their entire lives in iron lungs.
A nurse oversees a boy with polio in an iron lung in 1955.
Kirn Vintage Stock/Corbis/Getty Images
Bellows inside the large metal box provided suction to help patients breathe when they could no longer do so on their own. The device was first used to save the life of an eight-year-old patient in 1928.
Some famous people contracted polio as children, including Mia Farrow and Alan Alda.
John Farrow carries daughter Mia out of the hospital in 1954.
Bettmann via Getty Images
Farrow, the daughter of director John Farrow and the actress and Tarzan-girl Maureen O'Sullivan, became ill during an LA polio outbreak in the summer of 1954.
“What I saw will never leave me — in the hospitals and in the public wards for contagious diseases,” Farrow said in 2000.
Franklin D. Roosevelt started the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes, to find a cure for polio.
Children with polio meet Basil O'Connor, president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.
Matty Zimmerman/AP Photo
Roosevelt founded the organization with his former law partner, Basil O'Connor, to help fund research into a polio vaccine.
Roosevelt knew the effects of polio first-hand. He was diagnosed with polio in 1921 at the age of 39 and used a wheelchair, mainly in private, while he was president.
Celebrities such as Grace Kelly and Joan Crawford helped promote campaigns for a vaccine.
Grace Kelly with Mary Koloski at a March of Dimes event in 1955.
API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
These campaigns helped raise half of all donations to health charities in the US, PBS reported.
Jonas Salk was one of the researchers working on a polio vaccine.
Developer of the polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk in a laboratory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1954.
AP Photo
At the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Salk began developing a vaccine in the early 1950s.
He grew polioviruses on cultures of monkeys' kidney cells and then used formaldehyde to kill the virus.
When he injected the dead virus into live monkeys, it protected them from the disease, according to the Science History Institute.
After his vaccine proved successful on monkeys, Salk began testing children.
Jonas Salk gives a vaccine to a child in the 1950s.
Mondadori via Getty Images
Salk first injected children who had already had polio. He noted that their antibody levels rose after vaccination, a promising sign that it helped the body fight the infection.
Roosevelt's foundation also backed another potential prevention method, gamma globulin.
A line of children and parents wait to be immunized with gamma globulin in 1953.
Paul E. Thomson/AP Photo
In the early 1950s, over 220,000 children were injected with gamma globulin, proteins in blood plasma that are rich in antibodies. The hope was that the serum would boost kids' immune systems and keep them from contracting polio.
After looking at the data, though, a committee of epidemiologists and other experts concluded that gamma globulin wasn't effective.
The gamma globulin trials helped pave the way for similar trials with Salk's vaccine.
Salk gives a shot of the polio vaccine to a girl during test trials in 1954.
Bettmann/Getty Images
In 1954, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis sponsored a trial to test Salk's vaccine.
Nearly 2 million children between 6 and 9 years old participated. They were called “Polio Pioneers.”
Participants were divided into three groups: the first group received the vaccine, the second received a placebo, and the third received neither the vaccine nor a placebo.
The following year, in 1955, the vaccine was declared 90% effective against Types 2 and 3 poliovirus. It was 60% to 70% effective against Type 1.
Nearly 2 million children participated in the trials, and the vaccine was found to be 90% effective.
Jonas Salk arrives in Pittsburgh with his family in 1955.
AP Photo
At a press conference, Thomas Francis Jr., director of the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center at the University of Michigan, called the vaccine “Safe, effective, and potent.”
It was headline news. “The story has blanketed the front pages of all the papers I have seen along a 1,600-mile route from New York to Saint Louis, to Memphis and Dallas,” Alistair Cooke reported for The Guardian at the time.
Though he had some detractors, Salk won many Americans' trust.
Joans Salk's polio vaccine in 1955.
AP Photo
It took mere hours for Salk's vaccine to be licensed for use after the announcement of its efficacy.
Vaccine distribution began almost immediately.
Polio vaccines are shipped to Europe in 1955.
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
NFIP had already funded facilities that could start producing the vaccine right away. The US sent some vaccines to Europe, and some countries started up their own productions.
Children would receive a series of shots to complete the vaccination process.
Eight-year-old Ann Hill gets the polio vaccine days after Salk's announcement that it's effective.
AP Photo
Children needed three shots, each costing between $3 and $5 (around $35-$59 today), according to The Conversation.
Shortly after the vaccine program began, a tragic incident caused several deaths.
Vaccines are prepared to be distributed around the West Coast from Cutter Laboratories in April 1955.
Ernest K. Bennett/AP Photo
One of the facilities manufacturing the vaccine, Cutter Laboratories, had kept the live polio virus in hundreds of thousands of doses.
In April 1955, over 400,000 children received the improperly prepared vaccines. The mistake led to 260 cases of polio-based paralysis and several deaths, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Despite the incident at Cutter Laboratories, hundreds of thousands of children were vaccinated in 1955.
Son of the US Surgeon General Leonard McCormick “Bobo” Scheele receives the polio vaccine in May 1955.
Byron Rollins/AP Photo
The incident at Cutter Laboratories panicked many parents and the vaccine was pulled from the market on April 27, 1955.
However, after a massive effort to recheck all the vaccines confirmed they were safe to use, immunization resumed on May 15, 1955. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of children received the vaccine.
Elvis got the vaccine backstage during the “Ed Sullivan Show.”
Oct. 28, 1956: Elvis Presley receives the polio vaccine in New York City.
AP Photo
If people were hesitant to have their children vaccinated, Elvis may have helped persuade them. After he got the jab in the fall of 1956, many followed suit.
Within six months, 80% of America's youngest generation were vaccinated, Scientific American reported in 2021.
Other celebrities, including Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, also promoted the vaccine to help inform people of all races and genders.
A nurse prepares elementaary school children for a polio vaccine shot.
Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images
Roosevelt's foundation was heavily involved in promoting the vaccine and recruited celebrities like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald for their campaigns.
“There was a very early recognition that you couldn't just have white people talking about the vaccine,” Stacey D. Stewart, former president and CEO of the March of Dimes, told NPR in 2021.
The polio vaccine quickly began protecting people against the virus.
Edward Scheffler with his mother after traveling by railroad in 1957.
AP Photo
Between 1953 and 1957, cases in the US dropped from 35,000 to 5,300 a year, according to the BBC.
Meanwhile, Salk's rival, Albert Sabin, was still working on his own polio vaccine.
Mark Stacey is visited by Albert Sabin (right) and Dr. Walter Langsam (left) in 1959.
Gene Smith/AP Photo
Sabin disagreed with Salk's method of using a vaccine with a killed virus. Instead, he preferred a live, yet weakened form that could be taken by mouth instead of injected.
Once Sabin showed his version was effective using a trial in the Soviet Union, it was approved for use in the US in 1961.
Because Sabin's vaccine was inexpensive and easy to administer many countries began using the oral method. In fact, the song “A Spoonful of Sugar (Helps the Medicine Go Down)” in the 1964 film “Mary Poppins” was inspired by Sabin's polio vaccine.
A combination of the two vaccines helped nearly eradicate polio worldwide.
An emergency polio ward in Boston, Massachusetts in 1955.
AP Photo
During the 2010s, the world eradicated polio Types 2 and 3. Only Type 1 remains. The World Health Organization hopes to wipe out the final strain by 2026, but that goal is impossible without polio vaccines.
This story was originally published on August 13, 2022, and updated on December 16, 2024. Jake Johnson contributed to a previous version of this post.
The 1950s was a turning point for polio. Amidts deadly outbreaks, Jonas Salk developed a vaccine that saved countless from the virus. Health, Entertainment, polio, vaccines, elvis-presley, marlon-brando, diane-sawyer All Content from Business Insider
