17/04/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17zQwRNxZR/?mibextid=wwXIfr
"71 years ago today, one of the most important announcements in the history of American medicine was made at the University of Michigan. A vaccine was safe. A vaccine worked. And the disease it targeted had been paralyzing and killing American children for decades — including the President of the United States. 💉🇺🇸
His name was Jonas Salk.
Born October 28, 1914, in New York City — the oldest of three sons of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Poland who never attended school a day in their lives. His father Daniel could not read. His mother Dora was determined that her boys would be educated beyond anything she could imagine for herself.
Jonas was reading before he started school. He entered the City College of New York at 15. He earned his medical degree from New York University School of Medicine in 1939. He was not interested in practicing medicine. He was interested in research. He wanted to understand how disease worked at the level where it could be stopped.
He chose the right disease.
Poliomyelitis — polio — was the most feared illness in mid-century America. It struck without warning, mostly in summer, mostly children. It left some paralyzed for life. It killed others. It had put Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair in 1921 and never let him out. Every summer American parents kept their children away from swimming pools and public gatherings, terrified of the invisible threat. The March of Dimes — founded partly at Roosevelt's urging — raised millions of dollars searching for a vaccine.
Salk got there first.
Working at the University of Pittsburgh through the early 1950s, he developed a killed-virus vaccine — using inactivated polio virus to trigger the body's immune response without causing the disease. He tested it on himself. He tested it on his wife and three sons.
Then came the largest medical trial in American history.
In 1954 more than 1.8 million American children — called Polio Pioneers — participated in the field trial of Salk's vaccine. They rolled up their sleeves in schools across the country. Their parents signed the consent forms with trembling hope.
On April 12, 1955 — 71 years ago today — the announcement came from Ann Arbor, Michigan. The vaccine was safe. The vaccine was effective. The trial had worked.
The reaction was immediate and overwhelming. Church bells rang across America. People wept in the streets. Doctors and nurses in hospitals stood and applauded when they heard the news over the radio. It was described at the time as a moment of public joy unlike anything since the end of the Second World War.
Within two years polio cases in the United States had dropped by 85 percent.
Within a generation the disease that had terrified American parents every summer for decades was essentially gone from this country.
Salk was offered the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was celebrated as a national hero. When asked who owned the patent on the vaccine he said there was no patent. It belonged to the people. He estimated that patenting it would have cost the public $7 billion.
He never took a dollar of personal profit from it.
He spent the rest of his life working — founding the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, pursuing research on cancer and later HIV. He died on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla. He was 80 years old.
The son of immigrants who could not read. The boy who entered college at 15. The man who ended the disease that had put Roosevelt in a wheelchair — and then gave the cure away.
71 years ago today."
