Speaker 1: Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the known
Speaker 1: things go. A corridor of the mind, lined with shelves,
Speaker 1: cluttered with proof, stalked like a biological laboratory, with microscopes,
Speaker 1: stacks of slides, trays of glass vials, each topped with
Speaker 1: a black rubber stopper. This label says live virus. Oh God.
Speaker 1: There's a storage closet here, crowded with crutches and splints
Speaker 1: and braces, lined up by size down to the tiniest,
Speaker 1: fitted for toddlers. Nor Here a terrifying machine looks like
Speaker 1: something between a steel coffin and an MRI. It's an
Speaker 1: iron lung. This place, this laboratory, stores the facts that
Speaker 1: matter and matters of fact. It lies in a time
Speaker 1: between now and then. A sign on the door reads
Speaker 1: the last archive. Step across the threshold to an elementary
Speaker 1: school classroom in the year nineteen fifty five. It's time
Speaker 1: for health class. Kids seated in wooden desks, lined up
Speaker 1: in rows on squeaky linoleum floors. The teacher in an
Speaker 1: a line skirt and pumps draws the blinds and wheels
Speaker 1: out of projector. Today they're watching a film. The symptoms
Speaker 1: are quite familiar, they as it looks like a cold.
Speaker 1: Scientists think that most colds are caused by extremely small
Speaker 1: micro organisms called viruses viruses. This film is called Sniffles
Speaker 1: and Sneezes. It was made by McGraw hill Book Company.
Speaker 1: The first time I listened to it a few months ago,
Speaker 1: before the coming of the coronavirus, I thought it was quaint,
Speaker 1: sort of cute, sort of sweet, even a little silly.
Speaker 1: But now, honestly, now it's haunting. You. See what you
Speaker 1: think is a simple cold could really be the first
Speaker 1: symptoms of some other disease, such as measles, infantile paralysis, diphtheria,
Speaker 1: whooping cough, scarlet fever, influenzia, and others. Kids had to
Speaker 1: sit through films like this a lot in the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties because of the incredible revolution in the biomedical sciences
Speaker 1: in the first half of the twentieth century. Diseases had
Speaker 1: once been mysteries, but these mysteries began to yield to
Speaker 1: facts in the seventeenth century after the invention of the
Speaker 1: first microscopes, one scientists discovered micro organisms. Then came the
Speaker 1: germ theory of disease, and by the twentieth century modern vaccination.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen thirties, there were vaccines for a lot
Speaker 1: of deadly diseases diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus. But people had
Speaker 1: to show up to get vaccinated or to get their
Speaker 1: children vaccinated, and that required believing in something you couldn't
Speaker 1: see except with a microscope or in a health class film.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just fourth graders who had to sit through
Speaker 1: films about viruses. Grown ups did too, because everyone needed
Speaker 1: to understand the nature of disease in order to understand
Speaker 1: the need for a vaccine. And in nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: a very scary disease was still going around, polio. In
Speaker 1: the spring of that year, Vicky Merrick's brother Chris came
Speaker 1: home sick. He was three years old. He came down
Speaker 1: with something and he had a fever and he had
Speaker 1: cramps in his legs. And my father came home and
Speaker 1: I remember him telling or somebody telling me he was
Speaker 1: lying on the landing, you know, just sickly, and of
Speaker 1: course everybody was freaking out. And Chris told me that
Speaker 1: he daddy told him he was sick for like a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks. I heard. It was much shorter that
Speaker 1: it passed, and then my mother came down with it.
Speaker 1: I met Vicky when we were working on the first
Speaker 1: episode of this podcast. She's a voice coach and she'd
Speaker 1: come to help me out. We got to talking about
Speaker 1: all the other episodes I was trying to write, including
Speaker 1: this episode about polio, and Vicky said, oh, my mother
Speaker 1: had polio. There was a time in the United States
Speaker 1: when everyone had a polio story about their family, or
Speaker 1: their neighborhood, or someone they knew. Polio struck a whole generation.
Speaker 1: Vicky's father was a doctor. He and his wife had
Speaker 1: nine kids. First, little Chris got sick, and then Chris
Speaker 1: and Vicki's mother, Helen got sick. Heilen was thirty eight.
Speaker 1: She got it in the spring of fifty five. I
Speaker 1: think one day you'd be fine. Then you'd come home
Speaker 1: with a fever, a feeling of lightness, dizziness, weakness, and
Speaker 1: within days you might have lost the use of your
Speaker 1: legs and your arms, even your lungs, depending on how
Speaker 1: far up the spinal column the virus took hold. You
Speaker 1: are looking at a killer at work. These are healthy
Speaker 1: living cells under attack by the virus of poliomyelitis. The
Speaker 1: virus itself is not visible. Its lethal effect is infection,
Speaker 1: reduced activity, abnormal rounding, and death. Polio was the most
Speaker 1: feared disease in the United States. Cancer killed more people,
Speaker 1: but polio attacked children, especially very little children. The disease
Speaker 1: often left them crippled for life. The search for cure
Speaker 1: was one of the most important public health crusades in history.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we
Speaker 1: know what we know, how we used to know things,
Speaker 1: and what it seems lately as if we don't know
Speaker 1: anything at all. I'm Jillipour. This season, we're trying to
Speaker 1: solve a who'd done it? Who killed truth? In this episode,
Speaker 1: we're following the path of a pathogen, not just viruses,
Speaker 1: but something They spawned fear of vaccination. In the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: the federal government opened a new department. At its center
Speaker 1: was a door with gilt letters that read Office of
Speaker 1: the Secretary. The woman inside liked to be called missus Secretary.
Speaker 1: Her name was a Vita Kulpe Hobby, the US's first
Speaker 1: Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. She was tiny. She
Speaker 1: was known for her glamorous hats. On a list of
Speaker 1: the world's Best dressed Women. She was number eleven. When
Speaker 1: she took out a cigarette, ten men would jump to
Speaker 1: light it for her. She came from Texas. A reporter
Speaker 1: from Time magazine visited her once in that office. She
Speaker 1: looked small and feminine behind her broad mahogany esque but
Speaker 1: she moved with the poison competence of a successful business
Speaker 1: executive as she checked yes and no on a long
Speaker 1: list of requests for appointments and telephone priorities. Now and
Speaker 1: then she paused reflectively and puffed on a parliament then
Speaker 1: turned back to work outside. Down through the mazes, corridors
Speaker 1: and channels of health, education, and welfare. The news was
Speaker 1: spreading that Avida Hobby was a lady in complete command.
Speaker 1: The lady in command had a lot on her to
Speaker 1: do list, including polio. The President really believed in her.
Speaker 1: She'd run the campaign Organization's Citizens for Eisenhower and had
Speaker 1: helped the General win Texas. But Hobby had never been
Speaker 1: involved in medicine, or teaching, or social services. She was
Speaker 1: pretty much opposed to the federal government playing a role
Speaker 1: in any of those arenas. That was a plus, though,
Speaker 1: because Eisenhower felt the same way. He couldn't do the
Speaker 1: new deal because the public supported it, but he wanted
Speaker 1: to keep all the government programs he created as small
Speaker 1: as possible. He wanted to stop it from becoming a newer,
Speaker 1: bigger deal. But a public health crisis like polio, that
Speaker 1: is a big deal. Let's those start from the beginning,
Speaker 1: back to the beginning of Hobby's life, which was also
Speaker 1: around the beginning of the polio epidemic in America and
Speaker 1: the beginning of vaccination, because those three stories are all
Speaker 1: tangled up together. Avida Kulp was born outside of Austin
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh five. She was the second of seven children.
Speaker 1: Her mother named her Avida because it rhmed with her
Speaker 1: sister's name, Juanita. As a kid, Avida read the Congressional
Speaker 1: record for fun. She came from a political family. Her
Speaker 1: father was a Democrat, her mother a suffragist. They lived
Speaker 1: in the segregated South, where everything was segregated, including doctor's
Speaker 1: offices and hospitals. At the time, a lot of states
Speaker 1: had compulsory vaccination program especially for smallpox. Because of that,
Speaker 1: over the course of Avida's lifetime, smallpox all but disappeared.
Speaker 1: That disappearance, though, led to a paradox, the more successful
Speaker 1: the vaccine, the lower the incidents and virulence of the disease.
Speaker 1: With a disease on the wane, more people start to
Speaker 1: doubt that the vaccines necessary. This is what always happens.
Speaker 1: It's as if when people can't see children dying the
Speaker 1: smallpox anymore, they decide that smallpox doesn't actually exist. The
Speaker 1: American Anti Vaccination League was founded in nineteen o eight.
Speaker 1: When Avita was three, organizations like it were popping up
Speaker 1: all over the place. Then, early anti vaxxers thought that
Speaker 1: they spied a vast conspiracy, a well laid plan to
Speaker 1: medically enslave the nation. Soon the Anti Vaccination League was
Speaker 1: handing out pamphlets like this, one called the Crime against
Speaker 1: the school Child. All compulsory vaccination law is based on
Speaker 1: a triple falsehood that compulsory vaccination on a heart or
Speaker 1: the whole of the population is necessary to prevent small
Speaker 1: pots epidemics, That nothing else prevents small pots epidemics but
Speaker 1: general vaccination, and that vaccination is perfectly safe and harmless
Speaker 1: and never causes injury or death. All of these propositions
Speaker 1: are absolutely and demonstrably false, and therefore any law based
Speaker 1: on them is absolutely invalid. A century ago, the same
Speaker 1: Americans who railed against compulsory vaccination also railed against what
Speaker 1: they called compulsory insurance. In nineteen fifteen, when Avida was ten,
Speaker 1: it looked as though the US was finally about to
Speaker 1: pass legislation establishing a national health insurance program like most
Speaker 1: of the rest of the world, but conservative critics argued
Speaker 1: that it would be Unamerican, unsafe, uneconomic, unscientific, unfair, and unscrupulous. Then,
Speaker 1: around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, and a master
Speaker 1: stroke that's still kicking around today, they decided to call
Speaker 1: it socialized medicine, and with that the plan was defeated.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixteen, when Avita was eleven, the first major
Speaker 1: polio epidemic hit the US. It came mainly to New York.
Speaker 1: The most reliable statistics suggest that in the epidemics first
Speaker 1: year alone, twenty seven thousand Americans got infected and six
Speaker 1: thousand died. It hit kids hardest. More than three quarters
Speaker 1: of those who died were children under the age of five.
Speaker 1: For a long time, polio, which is also called infantile paralysis,
Speaker 1: was known heartbreakingly as the baby plague in Texas, newspapers.
Speaker 1: Ivida's parents would have read all sorts of advice about
Speaker 1: how to protect her. The disease is extremely infectious and contagious,
Speaker 1: particularly in the homes of the careless and the slovenly.
Speaker 1: Keep your house clean, keep the children clean, keep their
Speaker 1: bowels open, keep them away from crowds, and put them
Speaker 1: to bed early. But this advice, it turns out, probably
Speaker 1: wasn't much good. The pattern with other diseases had gone
Speaker 1: like this. The cleaner conditions got with the end of
Speaker 1: open air, sewers and privies, the lower the incidents of
Speaker 1: infectious disease. But polio didn't follow that pattern. The better
Speaker 1: the hygiene, it seemed, the worse the polio. At the time,
Speaker 1: no one understood why. But it turns out that babies
Speaker 1: and young children exposed to the poliovirus while they're still
Speaker 1: breastfeeding or not long after weaning, they developed antibodies strong
Speaker 1: enough to ward off an infection for life. Babies and
Speaker 1: young children most vulnerable were those who had never been
Speaker 1: exposed to the virus because they lived in antiseptic, hygienic places.
Speaker 1: Avida grew up picking cotton in Texas. She had the
Speaker 1: kind of not super spic and span childhood. That probably
Speaker 1: spared her. When Avida grew up, she decided to go
Speaker 1: into politics. She went to college for a couple of years,
Speaker 1: then left to sneak into law school classes at the
Speaker 1: University of Texas. In nineteen thirty, she ran for the
Speaker 1: state legislature as a Democrat, but lost to a candidate
Speaker 1: who was a member of the KKK. The next year,
Speaker 1: when she was twenty six, she married a man twice
Speaker 1: her age, former Governor of Texas, William Pettis Hobby. She
Speaker 1: always called him Governor. He was the publisher of the
Speaker 1: Houston Post. She worked there as a writer when she
Speaker 1: married him, Then she became an editor. Later she took
Speaker 1: over altogether. The Hobbies had two children, who were sixteen
Speaker 1: and eleven. During a particularly bad year for polio in Texas,
Speaker 1: somehow Vida's kids didn't get infected. Maybe she'd kept them inside.
Speaker 1: Good morning, boys and girls. Looks like Blondie and Dagwood
Speaker 1: are going to go out in a fishing party. Toby,
Speaker 1: you got any fishing music over there? Here as mine?
Speaker 1: That's Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis. On WCCO radio
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty six. You think stay at home campaigns
Speaker 1: are new, they're not. We've been through this before. During
Speaker 1: bad years for polio, American cities and towns ran campaigns
Speaker 1: urging kids to stay indoors every day all summer long
Speaker 1: in order to avoid catching polio. Radio stepped in to
Speaker 1: help kids fight the boredom. Humphrey read the funnies out
Speaker 1: loud over the radio with his two kids at his side.
Speaker 1: There's Dagwood, kids, and there's Dagwood right along. There's right
Speaker 1: alongside the lake shore there, and he says, I don't
Speaker 1: know why it is, I can't catch a fish. But
Speaker 1: Dagwood wasn't enough. Polio kept getting worse worse every year. Adults,
Speaker 1: of course, sometimes got it. Two Franklin dellan Or Roosevelt
Speaker 1: had gotten it in nineteen twenty one. Determined to find
Speaker 1: a cure, FDR helped found what became the March of Dimes.
Speaker 1: It's called that partly because kids would march around collecting
Speaker 1: dimes in ten cans for polio research. Avida Hobby and
Speaker 1: her husband had supported FDR when he ran for president
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty two. They were longtime Democrats, Southern conservative Democrats,
Speaker 1: so they opposed a lot of FDRs social programs. In
Speaker 1: nineteen forty two, Avida Hobby became a head of the
Speaker 1: Women's Army Corps. She was among the first woman ever
Speaker 1: to earn the rank of colonel. For her salary, she
Speaker 1: accepted a dollar a year. That's how she knew Dwight Eisenhower.
Speaker 1: He was the highest ranking man in the military. She
Speaker 1: was the highest ranking woman. By nineteen fifty two, Hobby
Speaker 1: had abandoned the Democratic candidate. She'd grown tired of the
Speaker 1: new Deal she liked ike. On the campaign trail, Eisenhower
Speaker 1: announced a proposal that many Democrats supported the establishment of
Speaker 1: national health insurance. Instead of the patient getting more and
Speaker 1: better medical care for less, he will get less and
Speaker 1: poor medical care or more. In nineteen fifty two, the
Speaker 1: United States witnessed the worst polio epidemic in its history.
Speaker 1: Fifty eight thousand Americans got infected everywhere. There were stories
Speaker 1: about suffering in interviews on the radio. But could you
Speaker 1: remember want to keep in mind, but all of these
Speaker 1: families that we're talking to today are just playing common
Speaker 1: ordinary American families. There isn't anything outstanding about them. You
Speaker 1: don't have to be the president of the United States
Speaker 1: or the President of Republic in order to get polio.
Speaker 1: You can be just a plain common, ordinary person like
Speaker 1: me and you. Ordinary people, including really little kids, had
Speaker 1: ended up living in iron lungs. It's that machine you're
Speaker 1: hearing right now, a machine that could breathe for polio
Speaker 1: victims who couldn't breathe on their own. It must have
Speaker 1: been like living in a coffin. Little Richard Basil knew
Speaker 1: what that felt like. Hi, what you know, Richard Basil?
Speaker 1: I want to ask you a good question. How did
Speaker 1: you like bringing that iron one like them? And you
Speaker 1: didn't like it? A bill? Who did you feel like
Speaker 1: they're really feeling to it at all? I felt cool,
Speaker 1: you felt air, and that era sort of did lots
Speaker 1: of things for this little two right, How do you
Speaker 1: certainly do look healthy? How old are you? Seven years old?
Speaker 1: And and here's a little seven year old guy that's
Speaker 1: going to go on to be president of the United
Speaker 1: States maybe or a ball player? How do you want
Speaker 1: to be a ball player? A little fellow that's seven
Speaker 1: years old and he's going to be a baseball player,
Speaker 1: and of course he's going to be able to do
Speaker 1: that too if he wants to if he has the ability,
Speaker 1: it's up to him. But he's going to be able
Speaker 1: to do it because of this big guy in lunch
Speaker 1: to that we were talking about this big guy in lung,
Speaker 1: the thing that breathed into him, the breath of life.
Speaker 1: How are you feeling that it pretty good? Well, that's
Speaker 1: really well, thank you very much, Richard Basil and a
Speaker 1: feminess is Basil. Well, I don't know about that interview.
Speaker 1: We sounds so heartless to me. That kid isn't going
Speaker 1: to grow up to play baseball. At the end of
Speaker 1: that terrible epidemic year nineteen fifty two, Eisenhower won the presidency,
Speaker 1: and he appointed the inimitable Evita Hobby to head what
Speaker 1: would become the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the
Speaker 1: department that would be charged with handling the polio crisis.
Speaker 1: Hobby was a dynamo. She oversaw one of the biggest
Speaker 1: budgets of any department of the federal government. She was
Speaker 1: only the second woman ever to serve in the cabinet,
Speaker 1: and reporters found her irresistible. She works six days a week,
Speaker 1: with time off every Saturday afternoon for a hair due
Speaker 1: at Elizabeth Ardens. Her day begins at six thirty a m.
Speaker 1: With a thorough perusal of the newspapers, and she arrives
Speaker 1: at the office a little after nine. As a rule,
Speaker 1: work continues through lunch, invariably cottage, cheese or fruit salads,
Speaker 1: with missus Secretary issuing orders as she eats. Most nights,
Speaker 1: Ovida hobby is hard at work until midnight. Someone else
Speaker 1: was hard at work that year. The man who would
Speaker 1: perfect a vaccine for polio a young, brilliant and ambitious virologist,
Speaker 1: doctor Jonas Salk. The story of the polio vaccine became
Speaker 1: a legend even as it was being reported. Working at
Speaker 1: Pittsburgh University's virus Research Laboratory, a forty year old doctor
Speaker 1: Salk labored three years, often sixteen hours a day, six
Speaker 1: days a week, till painstakingly perfect a vaccine. Jonas Salk
Speaker 1: developed the polio vaccine in nineteen fifty two. The problem
Speaker 1: was how to prove that it worked. Incredibly in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four, he ran a field trial on millions of children,
Speaker 1: starting with his own. Some of the kids in the
Speaker 1: study would get the vaccine, others would get a fake shot,
Speaker 1: and still others no shot at all. Even so, it
Speaker 1: was the largest such medical test ever attempted. Four hundred
Speaker 1: and forty thousand youngsters in forty four stays were inoculated
Speaker 1: with the Salk vaccine, two hundred and ten thousand received
Speaker 1: dummy shots, and more than a million other children were observed.
Speaker 1: In comparison, not a single child who completed the Salk
Speaker 1: vaccinations died of paralytic polio. People who lived through this
Speaker 1: time remember the vaccine announcement like it was yesterday. It
Speaker 1: was a public health triumph of victory for science the
Speaker 1: world truly, the world celebrated. Poliomyolitis or infantil paralysis is
Speaker 1: no longer the scourge it once was. Thanks to the
Speaker 1: killed virus vaccine developed by doctor Jonas Sack and first
Speaker 1: he was in nineteen fifty five, thousands have been spared
Speaker 1: death and crippling. That's the storybook version of the Stock vaccine.
Speaker 1: The legend and much of that story is true, but
Speaker 1: it leaves out a few things, things that turn out
Speaker 1: to have to do with race, and especially with the
Speaker 1: federal government's authority to make decisions about health, education, and welfare.
Speaker 1: The kids in the field trial to test whether they'd
Speaker 1: contracted polio, they'd have their blood drawn, but to tell
Speaker 1: whether that blood contained the virus, it had to be
Speaker 1: tested on sales that Laboratories involved in the field trial
Speaker 1: used cells that had been grown from a sample taken
Speaker 1: from a woman named Henriette Alas Jonah Sax. Field trial
Speaker 1: wouldn't have succeeded without those cells. This is where the
Speaker 1: story about polio becomes a story about race. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty one, Henriet Alas went to the doctor. She was thirty,
Speaker 1: a black woman with five children. She had a terrible pain.
Speaker 1: She described it as a knot in her womb. She
Speaker 1: had cervical cancer, a very aggressive cancer. You might know
Speaker 1: about Henriette Alas if you've read a book by Rebecca
Speaker 1: Sclute called The Immortal Life of Henriette A. Lax. Sclute,
Speaker 1: with a lot of help from one of LAX's daughters,
Speaker 1: tells the story of how a cell biologist in Baltimore,
Speaker 1: George Guy, scraped some cells from LAX's tumor. Then he
Speaker 1: kept those cells in his lab at Johns Hopkins without
Speaker 1: the knowledge or consent of Henriette Lacks. A few months later,
Speaker 1: a surgeon took still more cells from her tumor. They
Speaker 1: were unlike any cells anyone had ever seen before. Usually
Speaker 1: cells don't last long, but LAX's cancer cells lived and
Speaker 1: kept growing, and they grew fast, incredibly fast. Guy called
Speaker 1: the cell line the HeLa strain, after the first two
Speaker 1: letters in each of her names. They became part of
Speaker 1: the fight against HIV AIDS. They're being used to study
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen. They've revolutionized medical research, but the ways they've
Speaker 1: been used have also raised all kinds of medical ethics issues.
Speaker 1: It also turned out that the HeLa cells were very
Speaker 1: susceptible to the poliovirus. Doctors had long believed that African
Speaker 1: Americans were immune to polio because it seemed to hit affluent,
Speaker 1: white family's hardest, maybe because of their affluence. One theory
Speaker 1: was that wealthier families kept cleaner houses, which made their
Speaker 1: children less likely to be immune. But black children did
Speaker 1: get polio, and when they got sick, they were barred
Speaker 1: from the best treatment centers. So the Tuskegee Institute, a
Speaker 1: historically black college, founded its own polio research and treatment center,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen fifty three Tuskegee started a cell factory
Speaker 1: producing HeLa cells to be used in socks field trial.
Speaker 1: The Tuskegee Institute cell factory. The first cell factory ever
Speaker 1: was staffed by a team of black women's scientists, eventually
Speaker 1: thirty five of them. They worked in specially outfitted, air
Speaker 1: conditioned laboratories. They used binocular microscopes. They pioneered the development
Speaker 1: of rubber screw tops for test tubes that they stacked
Speaker 1: in special stainless steel racks. At the peak of the project,
Speaker 1: they shipped twenty thousand cultures a week in boxes marked
Speaker 1: perishable biological material. The Black women at Tuskegee, growing cells
Speaker 1: from the cell line of Henrietta Lacks, eventually shipped some
Speaker 1: six hundred thousand test tubes of HeLa cells. This part
Speaker 1: of the story wasn't entirely left out of the legend
Speaker 1: of Jonas sock I did find one mention of it
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty five from a New York Times your
Speaker 1: story about twenty five Negro scientists and technicians are participating
Speaker 1: in the production of HeLa cells. About half of the
Speaker 1: laboratories are using HeLa cells prepared on Tuskegee's campus. The
Speaker 1: Times described the HeLa cells as cells taken from a
Speaker 1: single human cancer which resulted in the death of a
Speaker 1: woman in Baltimore. They're protecting her anonymity, But the Times
Speaker 1: never mentioned that the cells came from a black woman.
Speaker 1: I have a theory about that particular silence. The Supreme
Speaker 1: Court had just ruled in Brown v. Board of Education
Speaker 1: that segregation is unconstitutional, which had led to a resurgence
Speaker 1: of white nationalism. That was the state of the nation
Speaker 1: at the time of Jonah Socks Field trials, trials that
Speaker 1: mixed the blood of white children with cells taken from
Speaker 1: a black woman. Probably that was just not a story
Speaker 1: the Times was willing to tell in nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't have wanted white people to not take the
Speaker 1: vaccine because it had come, even indirectly from a black woman.
Speaker 1: The results of the Field trial finally came in on
Speaker 1: April twelfth, nineteen fifty five, and historic victory over a
Speaker 1: dread disease is dramatically unfolded at the University of Michigan. Here,
Speaker 1: scientists ush're in a new medical age with the monumental
Speaker 1: reports that prove the Salk vaccine against crippling polio to
Speaker 1: be a sensational success. It doesn't take any historical imagination
Speaker 1: these days to understand the relief the public must have
Speaker 1: felt hearing the news that day. We all know what
Speaker 1: it feels like to wait for that day, for that news.
Speaker 1: The anticipation of getting everyone immunized, the prospect of ending
Speaker 1: the long days of staying at home. A vaccine. A vaccine,
Speaker 1: Thank god, a vaccine. It's a day of triumph for
Speaker 1: forty year old doctor Jonas Salk, developer of the vaccine.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of reporters and scientists from all over the nation
Speaker 1: gather for the momentous announcement. Proudly on hand too or
Speaker 1: missus Salk and the sun who received the first injections.
Speaker 1: Reporters flooded a building at the University of Michigan to
Speaker 1: hear the announcement of the results of Sak's field trial
Speaker 1: to field trial that had been made possible by Tuskegee
Speaker 1: and the HeLa cells. They stampeded to get a hold
Speaker 1: of copies of the press release, and the entire world
Speaker 1: heralded the discovery, which assured an end to one of
Speaker 1: mankind's most dread diseases. That night, Jonas Salk appeared on
Speaker 1: CBS's See It Now, interviewed by Edward R. Murrow, who
Speaker 1: owned the pattern on this vaccine well the people. I
Speaker 1: would say, there is no pat is. Could you patent
Speaker 1: the sun? Well, doctor sal what about the priorities? Who
Speaker 1: should determine who gets what in this limited supply situation? Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's unfair really to let everyone decide for
Speaker 1: himself who gets what. It would be as if everyone
Speaker 1: on your show decided what he wanted to do, if
Speaker 1: and when he wanted to do it. It seems to
Speaker 1: me there ought to be some central intelligence that would indicate,
Speaker 1: at least suggest what should be done, if not specify.
Speaker 1: The scientists had done their part to protect kids from polio.
Speaker 1: Now the government needed to step up with its central
Speaker 1: intelligence a way to get the vaccine out to the public.
Speaker 1: The Congressional record shows that Secretary Hobby did express a
Speaker 1: lot of excitement. It's a great day. It's a wonderful
Speaker 1: day for the whole world. It's a history making day.
Speaker 1: In parts of the world. With compulsory national insurance, the
Speaker 1: polio vaccine was rolled out right away. Ontario, Canada committed
Speaker 1: to provide free vaccines for all citizens between six months
Speaker 1: and twenty years old. Things went differently in the United States.
Speaker 1: The day after Sauk announced his vaccine, Avida Hobby appeared
Speaker 1: before Congress. She struck down any suggestion that the distribution
Speaker 1: of the vaccine should be regulated by the federal government,
Speaker 1: or that vaccination should be compulsory if we were to
Speaker 1: try to put this on a regulatory basis, because of
Speaker 1: the length of tom it would take to achieve the
Speaker 1: regulatory basis, it is entirely possible that many children would
Speaker 1: thereby have been denied the shots. Okay, making regulations takes time,
Speaker 1: and we don't have the time. Summer was coming, but
Speaker 1: the field trial had been going on for nearly two years.
Speaker 1: Why wasn't there a plan already set up ready to go.
Speaker 1: As a lady in command, Hobby could be famously, terrifyingly effective.
Speaker 1: Why had she dropped this ball? Eisenhower was getting frustrated.
Speaker 1: Kids were clamoring to go outside. Everyone knew the rate
Speaker 1: of polio infections rose with the heat. The clock was ticking.
Speaker 1: The President asked Hobby to report on her plan to
Speaker 1: distribute the vaccine. It was just around this time, spring
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty five, that Vicky Merrick's mother got sick.
Speaker 1: Vicky's mother, who had nine kids and new husband, was
Speaker 1: a doctor. Vicky was just a baby. Not yet one
Speaker 1: the littlest. Their father noted the progress of the disease
Speaker 1: in a tiny notebook that VICKI still got. I was
Speaker 1: searching for one of my dad's little notebooks because I
Speaker 1: know I've seen that that marking of his, like saying
Speaker 1: at ten fifty two lungs. You know, like when Napolio
Speaker 1: was moving through her body before she went to the
Speaker 1: iron lung I remember seeing this, you know, rundown of
Speaker 1: like hily fever lungs something, and you know, it was
Speaker 1: kind of like running through the evening. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think it moved through her pretty quickly, and they finally said,
Speaker 1: all right, we gotta go to the iron lung. Well,
Speaker 1: Vicky's mother lay in a breathing machine in Massachusetts. Eisenhower
Speaker 1: in Washington convened to cabinet meeting. I've got them minutes
Speaker 1: to that meeting here in the last archive. There is
Speaker 1: no transcript, just the minutes. Here's what went down. Eisenhower
Speaker 1: wonted Hobby to come up with a national plan for
Speaker 1: the federal government to distribute the vaccine free of charge.
Speaker 1: He wanted that plan yesterday, but Hobby had just sat
Speaker 1: on this request because she wanted the states to distribute
Speaker 1: the vaccine, or corporations, pharmaceutical companies, or charities, anyone but
Speaker 1: the federal government, because she didn't want socialized medicine. Listen in,
Speaker 1: Eisenhower turns to a presidential medical advisor named Chester Keefer.
Speaker 1: How much would it cost to provide the vaccine to
Speaker 1: children who could not afford four dollars and twenty cents
Speaker 1: for three ccason enough for three shots? How much would
Speaker 1: it cost for a national program to provide the vaccine
Speaker 1: to every child whose family could not afford it. Ah, well,
Speaker 1: mister President, that's five states have already enacted laws to
Speaker 1: provide these funds, and thirteen more are doing so. My
Speaker 1: department is now considering alternative proposals for financing shots for
Speaker 1: poor children, rather than announce a program of matching grants. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to see how many of the states will
Speaker 1: provide this themselves. The government's program should probably be limited
Speaker 1: to assist in those states who cannot do this. The
Speaker 1: government must ensure that, if necessary, federal funds will be
Speaker 1: forthcoming to cover the cost of the vaccine for children
Speaker 1: who cannot afford it. No child must be denied the
Speaker 1: vaccine for financial reasons. If necessary, we should use the
Speaker 1: President's emergency fund, but some source must be found. It
Speaker 1: is not clear. We have not decided who would be
Speaker 1: the proper distributing agents, the Public Health Service, the Children's Bureau.
Speaker 1: There are only so many excuses hobby could come up with. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: not only did the President presser for a plan, but
Speaker 1: the governors of every state ask for a department to
Speaker 1: take charge. Then tragedy film. Hobbyhead licensed six pharmaceutical companies
Speaker 1: to manufacture the vaccine, but one of those companies failed
Speaker 1: to inspected samples was sufficient care. They prepared vaccines that
Speaker 1: actually caused polio. Vaccinated children became infected, some were crippled,
Speaker 1: and some died. At first, parents had rushed to get
Speaker 1: their kids vaccinated. Now, with this news overnight, a lot
Speaker 1: of parents were terrified of the vaccine. That summer nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five, Vicky Merrick's mother, Aileen, was still in the
Speaker 1: hospital in the Iron Lung Ward. She'd made a good
Speaker 1: friend there, a woman about her age named Lily Manning.
Speaker 1: Lily's husband, like Aileen's husband, was a doctor. He actually
Speaker 1: had the vaccine, had it at home in their fridge,
Speaker 1: ready to go, but at the last minute, he decided
Speaker 1: not to give it to his wife because he was
Speaker 1: worried about that bad batch, the bad batch that caused polio,
Speaker 1: and then she got sick. Her story was very similar
Speaker 1: to my mother's anyway. So there's this batch waiting, and
Speaker 1: then this woman contracted it while she had the vaccine
Speaker 1: in the refrigerator. Was the Secretary Hobby's fault, Jesus? I
Speaker 1: think so? Anyway, she had to answer for it before
Speaker 1: the Senate. Now, I wonder why it was necessary to
Speaker 1: delay action in making the survey until two days after
Speaker 1: the public announcement was made by doctor Salk and the
Speaker 1: Evaluating Committee, when there was every indication a long time
Speaker 1: in advance of that that this vaccine would at least
Speaker 1: be reasonably effective. A Democrat from New York press Hobby
Speaker 1: and why she'd failed even to make an initial survey
Speaker 1: of the problem until it was nearly already too late.
Speaker 1: I would like to have some explanation, you would, well,
Speaker 1: I can give you part of it now. I would
Speaker 1: assume that this is an incident unique in medical history.
Speaker 1: I think no one could have foreseen the demand. I
Speaker 1: don't think the Senator need be troubled too seriously about
Speaker 1: this may I say, I am very sorely troubled. Finally,
Speaker 1: Hobby put together a plan. She declared that the federal
Speaker 1: government would not take charge of vaccination or make it compulsory. Instead,
Speaker 1: it would allocate grants to the states to be used
Speaker 1: to distribute the vaccine to poor children. By then, Democrats
Speaker 1: had begun to call for Hobby's resignation. How could the
Speaker 1: United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare not have
Speaker 1: made a plan sooner? This is about as glaring an
Speaker 1: example of how a secretary of a government department should
Speaker 1: not act, because I have ever seen in the administration
Speaker 1: of our government. The Senate called Hobby back for another grilling.
Speaker 1: But now some Republicans were ready to make this a
Speaker 1: bigger argument, a political argument about public health. Now, I
Speaker 1: think this gets down to the thing that both you
Speaker 1: and I are afraid of that where we have federal provisions,
Speaker 1: we have federal control. Is that not true? Well, they
Speaker 1: go hand in hand, or they walk very closely together,
Speaker 1: I should say. Senator Goldwater, the arch conservative Barry Goldwater
Speaker 1: of Arizona, saw things Hobby's way. Compulsory vaccination, compulsory health insurance.
Speaker 1: It all led in one direction. If this situation ever
Speaker 1: came about in this country, and let us pray that
Speaker 1: it never does. Is there any other term for it
Speaker 1: than socialized medicine, that is, socialized medicine by the back
Speaker 1: door and knock by the front door. Missus Secretary, you
Speaker 1: have just said what constitutes my greatest fear about this approach.
Speaker 1: By July of nineteen fifty five, more than four million
Speaker 1: American children had received a polio vaccination, and it worked.
Speaker 1: Polio would never again plague the country the way it
Speaker 1: had plagued it for so many years. Later that month,
Speaker 1: Avida Hobby resigned from Eisenhower's cabinet. She said she was
Speaker 1: leaving to care for her elderly husband. That summer, Vicky
Speaker 1: Merrick's mother, Aileen, was still in the Iron Lung Ward.
Speaker 1: All the patients had mirrors at the ends of their beds,
Speaker 1: so that even while lying down, they could look a
Speaker 1: little bit around the room. Lily Manning, the friend she'd
Speaker 1: met there, was later interviewed by a newspaper about their
Speaker 1: time on that ward. When I went to see VICKI,
Speaker 1: she read that interview to me. One after another of
Speaker 1: the days came when a nurse would walk by each lung,
Speaker 1: turning each mirror down. They lowered the mirrors whenever a
Speaker 1: body had to be passed between us. Manning says, they'd
Speaker 1: roll it by to get to work cleaning the lung,
Speaker 1: and a little while later another patient was put in.
Speaker 1: Lily Manning and Aileen Merrick were realists. They would not
Speaker 1: dance again, but they would go home, and Marek was
Speaker 1: determined not to spend her life in an iron lung.
Speaker 1: In December of that year, Vicki and her eight brothers
Speaker 1: and sisters went to see their mother in the hospital.
Speaker 1: Vicky has a photograph the boys with their crew cuts,
Speaker 1: the girls in beautiful dresses. Is everybody in their Sunday
Speaker 1: clothes and then a priest, a cardinal standing by. So
Speaker 1: this is I think it was like a Christmas Eve
Speaker 1: something where Cardinal Cushing like set a mass for the
Speaker 1: family and came in and they let us into the
Speaker 1: hospital to sit with my mom. So yeah, there is
Speaker 1: everybody and my dad wow, and this is your yeah, oblivious.
Speaker 1: Vicky's mom would joke about it that visit from the cardinal,
Speaker 1: and she had a pretty you know, classic Irish you know,
Speaker 1: Gallows sense of humor. She goes, no, no, seriously, where
Speaker 1: can you read the newspaper, listen to the radio, eat
Speaker 1: your lunch, move your bowels, and visit with his eminence
Speaker 1: all at the same time. Finally, on Mother's Day nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty six, Vicky's mom got to come home. When she
Speaker 1: came home and she was in a wheelchair, she was
Speaker 1: ripping through the house and just like breathless, but going
Speaker 1: this places a pig sty and you know, like yelling
Speaker 1: at everybody about whatever, and and so I think that
Speaker 1: there was this fake out, like maybe my brothers and
Speaker 1: everybody thought, oh, she's back. Just a few days later,
Speaker 1: she got pneumonia, but she wouldn't go back to an
Speaker 1: iron lung. She was determined. And for a long time,
Speaker 1: I think maybe I was mad at her because I
Speaker 1: thought that she chose not to go back in time
Speaker 1: into an iron lung. But I think that she was
Speaker 1: just like I can't go back into an iron lung,
Speaker 1: Like I can't live my life like that. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Eileen Merrick died that May nineteen fifty six. The wake
Speaker 1: was held at their house. Vicky remembers as a little
Speaker 1: girl being confused. They were making all these sandwiches and
Speaker 1: I could tell everybody was like bustling around, like as
Speaker 1: if we were having a party. And there she is
Speaker 1: in the room, in her open coffin, and I kept saying,
Speaker 1: why is mummy taking a nap? If we're having a party,
Speaker 1: why is she resting? Now, you know, it could strike
Speaker 1: anybody anywhere. It was so devastating that many of its
Speaker 1: victims were paralyzed in spirit, as well as Bonnie. When
Speaker 1: Avida Hobby resigned, Eisenhower said he greatly regretted her departure.
Speaker 1: He agreed with the Secretary of the Treasury, who told her,
Speaker 1: you're the best man in the cabinet. Hobby left Washington,
Speaker 1: but the political schisms she'd help make only grew wider.
Speaker 1: One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or so
Speaker 1: sism on a people has been by way of medicine.
Speaker 1: It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a
Speaker 1: humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose
Speaker 1: anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't
Speaker 1: afford it. That's the actor Ronald Reagan, just a few
Speaker 1: years later, in nineteen sixty one, turning himself into a
Speaker 1: political candidate by setting out his agenda, he would wage
Speaker 1: a war against creeping socialism by fighting against socialized medicine,
Speaker 1: by which he meant at the time Medicare. But he
Speaker 1: also set out to fight public trust in the idea
Speaker 1: that big government can solve big problems. Avidahabi went back
Speaker 1: to Texas and ran the Houston Post for years. She
Speaker 1: died in nineteen ninety five at the age of ninety. Three.
Speaker 1: Years later, a claim started circulating that the measles, mumps,
Speaker 1: and rubella vaccine causes autism. That set in motion a
Speaker 1: new anti vaccination movement. In the year two thousand, the
Speaker 1: Centers for Disease Control declared that measles had been eliminated
Speaker 1: in the United States, sparing thousands of children and early death.
Speaker 1: It turned out that announcement was premature. By twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: the government was battling multiple outbreaks of measles. Nearly ninety
Speaker 1: percent of those infected had never been vaccinated. A quarter
Speaker 1: of the world's population is now living under some form
Speaker 1: of lockdown due to coronavirus. More than three billion people
Speaker 1: in almost seventy countries and territories have been asked to
Speaker 1: stay at home. The worldwide pandemic of COVID nineteen the contagion,
Speaker 1: the deaths, the isolation, the economic shock, the race for
Speaker 1: a vaccine, iron lungs replaced by ventilators. All that was
Speaker 1: not lurking in my mind as I researched this episode,
Speaker 1: because it hadn't happened yet. Instead, I'd been thinking about
Speaker 1: long ago viruses and about other older patterns that kept
Speaker 1: the United States from adopting universal health insurance. I'd been
Speaker 1: investigating a crime, the killing of truth. It had felt
Speaker 1: like a metaphor when I began, before people started dying.
Speaker 1: Researching this episode. I wanted to find out the mechanism
Speaker 1: by which people had come to be suspicious of vaccines,
Speaker 1: and it seemed to me that it has something to
Speaker 1: do with the opposition to universal healthcare. But there was
Speaker 1: something else going on too, a forgetting. I called an expert.
Speaker 1: You see him in the news all the time these days,
Speaker 1: talking about the coronavirus, doctor William Schaffner, a professor at
Speaker 1: Vanderbilt and the medical director of the National Foundation for
Speaker 1: Invectious Diseases. It must be now about ten years ago.
Speaker 1: I was just speaking. Asked to speak to a group
Speaker 1: of parents, largely moms, who were vaccine skeptical they wanted information,
Speaker 1: so they gathered about. There were somewhere between twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty of them, and I decided that I wasn't trying
Speaker 1: to persuade anybody of anything, but I would tell them
Speaker 1: first about the diseases. And I was talking about one
Speaker 1: or another and began then to talk about poliomyelitis polio,
Speaker 1: and one of the ladies there got a very quizzical
Speaker 1: look on her face, and I said, let's stop for
Speaker 1: a moment, missus Jones, and as you seem confused about something,
Speaker 1: ask a question and then we can go on. And
Speaker 1: she said, why are you suddenly talking about shirts? So
Speaker 1: she mixed up polio with of course the manufacturer polo
Speaker 1: vaccination provides what's called herd immunity. Everyone needs to do it,
Speaker 1: the whole herd. It's about trusting science, but it's also
Speaker 1: about having a sense of commonweal, the common good. That's
Speaker 1: what we don't have. I kept hearing in my head
Speaker 1: something Vicky Merrick told me about a letter she'd written
Speaker 1: to her father, the physician, while she was trying to
Speaker 1: come to terms with the loss of her mother. He
Speaker 1: wrote me back on a prescription piece of paper which
Speaker 1: he would do sometimes, and he just wrote on the
Speaker 1: pad on the prescription pad was like PS, regarding your
Speaker 1: motherless childhood. It's crippling, but not paralyzing. Love Dad. I
Speaker 1: guess I sometimes feel that way about American history. The
Speaker 1: burdens of this past, the beauty, the horror, the gift,
Speaker 1: the loss, the people who lived through it remember the
Speaker 1: rest of us only think we're immune, or at least
Speaker 1: we used to think that. The Last Archive is produced
Speaker 1: by Sophie Crane mccabbon and Bennette of Haaffrey. Our editor
Speaker 1: is Julia Barton and our executive producer is Mia Lobell.
Speaker 1: Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez are our engineers. Fact checking
Speaker 1: by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John
Speaker 1: Evans of Stellwagens Infinett. Many of verse oun effects are
Speaker 1: from Harry Janett Jr. And The Star Jenette Foundation. Our
Speaker 1: full proof players are Barlow Adams and Daniel Burger Jones,
Speaker 1: Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent.
Speaker 1: The Last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater,
Speaker 1: Alex Allenson in the Bridge Sounding Stage, Philip Brush, The
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Speaker 1: Thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Kanig, Carly mcgliori, Emily Rostick,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw,
Speaker 1: Olivia Oldham, Henrietta'reilly, Oliver Riskin Kutz and Emily Spector. I'm
Speaker 1: Jill Lapoor