The tragic story of a Canadian vaccine trailblazer
Maurice Brodie was the first person to develop a working polio vaccine. He was cast as a dashing young hero, and celebrated in the U.S., until it all came crashing down. By Keith Johnston
February 22, 2021 Shots of the Salk polio vaccine are given to children in the U.S. in 1954, decades after Brodie s first trials (Bettmann/Getty Images)
He was called a “savant” and a “savior,” thought a contender for a Nobel Prize and named alongside John Steinbeck as an American “genius whose work will live on through the centuries.” But he wasn’t American, he was Canadian, and by 1939 just four years after receiving international acclaim his vaccine research was shuttered, he had been fired from a prestigious job at New York University and he was dead of a heart attack, though one former colleague called it a suicide.