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The tragic story of a Canadian vaccine trailblazer


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. ....

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The Cutter incident and the rollout of the polio vaccine.


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Baby boomers remember both the fear of poliomyelitis the viral infection that attacks the nervous system, leaving some who contract it paralyzed, or dead and the relief that they felt when the rollout of Jonas Salk’s vaccine put an end to repeated midcentury summer outbreaks of the disease. In 1954, the summer before this rollout, 1.8 million kids participated in a widely publicized trial of the new vaccine. From the vantage point of 2020, when vaccine skepticism floats right below the surface of public debate, the widespread embrace of the new vaccine feels surprising. Was the March of Dimes–financed rollout of Salk’s miracle jab, conducted in a hurry as polio threatened to strike again in the summer of 1955, really as smooth as history makes it seem? ....

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