Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
Speaker 2: a weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's people
Speaker 2: trying to do good things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
Speaker 2: and this week I have a guest. I guess I
Speaker 2: usually have a guest, but this week I have a
Speaker 2: guest named Annie Reese. Hi, how are you?
Speaker 3: I'm good. I feel like that's a loaded question these days,
Speaker 3: but yes, I'm good. How are you?
Speaker 2: I'm also good with air quotes everywhere.
Speaker 3: Yes, I'm very excited to be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. And if people
Speaker 2: haven't heard of you, which is surprising, you are one
Speaker 2: of the hosts of Stuff Mom Never told You. And
Speaker 2: you're also a host of Savor, which is a food podcast,
Speaker 2: and I haven't actually heard that one yet, But I
Speaker 2: am learning more and more about how I care about
Speaker 2: food in terms of culture and politics and history and stuff.
Speaker 2: And I just really appreciate y'all's tagline there's no you
Speaker 2: and Savor.
Speaker 3: Thank you. We Actually the show is big on puns
Speaker 3: and oh good bad jokes, if you'll allow me to say,
Speaker 3: but yes, that is a huge part of Savors that
Speaker 3: I feel like a lot of times people divorce food
Speaker 3: from politics when they really shouldn't, and history when they
Speaker 3: really shouldn't. And there's just so much to learn from
Speaker 3: what you're eating every day. So that's my bitch for saver.
Speaker 2: I want to hear it now. I like stuff mom'
Speaker 2: never told you, and I think people will like these
Speaker 2: things too. And if there's one thing you can say
Speaker 2: about the current administration, this is not going to be
Speaker 2: an episode about the current administration. Oh, I have to
Speaker 2: do the rest of the introductions, including Sophie, who's our producer? Hi, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Damn, it's just gonna forget me. I got a bright
Speaker 1: prank hat on.
Speaker 2: I never forget you, Sophie.
Speaker 3: I would never forget Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: And good house plants always good house.
Speaker 1: Plans, Thank you. Pretty bushy behind me today, I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I want to touch it.
Speaker 2: We also have a new audio and who's Eva. Everyone's
Speaker 2: to say hi to Eva, Hi Eva.
Speaker 3: Hi Eva, Hiva. Eva's great.
Speaker 1: He's gonna put that out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and actually Eva's been editing Our book Club, one
Speaker 2: of my other shows. They cools on Media book Club
Speaker 2: for a while.
Speaker 1: Now, don't worry, we didn't get rid of Rory. Rory's
Speaker 1: just working on a different project.
Speaker 2: Yeah, mining coal. Yeah, actually not doing the mining of
Speaker 2: the coal. But if you hang out in a cage,
Speaker 2: you can keep track of when there's bad chemicals in
Speaker 2: the air.
Speaker 1: I feel like we should make people at least, you know,
Speaker 1: say haw to Rory one more time. I think, Hello, Rory, Hi,
Speaker 1: Ri Hi Ory, if you want to say hi Rory more.
Speaker 1: He's editing behind the bastards now.
Speaker 2: So I am, well, okay, the current administration thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's going on there? That was like a really
Speaker 1: wild little teaser you did.
Speaker 2: So I went and did a Have you all ever
Speaker 2: heard of lavender graduations?
Speaker 3: No? No, I have not.
Speaker 2: I hadn't, and I'm kind of embarrassed that I hadn't.
Speaker 2: It's LGBT groups on college campuses have a graduation ceremony.
Speaker 2: And I went and did a talk at one yesterday.
Speaker 2: As we record this, and I was very like, how
Speaker 2: is this gonna go? They hired a kind of fiery
Speaker 2: anarchist to come give them their LGBT speech. I'm going
Speaker 2: to tell them about gay people who had burned down
Speaker 2: Nazi records. And then it kind of helped realizing that
Speaker 2: everyone is really aware that things aren't okay right now,
Speaker 2: So that was kind of actually promising. So in a
Speaker 2: weird way, the one nice thing you can say about
Speaker 2: the current situation is that no one has their head
Speaker 2: in the sands in the same degree anymore.
Speaker 1: That's fair.
Speaker 2: Did it go well, Oh yeah, the event went great.
Speaker 2: It was really heartwarming. Actually, it was a very like, oh,
Speaker 2: the kids are all right kind of moment, which is
Speaker 2: condescending to say because they're not kids. There are like
Speaker 2: twenty two I don't know how people are when they
Speaker 2: graduate college.
Speaker 3: Who knows. Two.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So if there is one thing this does actually
Speaker 2: relate to what we're gonna talk about this week and
Speaker 2: a lot in the near future. If there's one thing
Speaker 2: I can say about the current administration of the United States,
Speaker 2: it's that it has made us realize that there's an
Speaker 2: awful lot of stuff we take for granted. Right, Like,
Speaker 2: I've never been a big like government person, this is
Speaker 2: true about me, right, but I'm a big like social
Speaker 2: services person. But I'm like, oh, there's all of these
Speaker 2: things that are really really good that we try to
Speaker 2: do as a society, and we like stuff that society
Speaker 2: tends to do for us. And a lot of that
Speaker 2: stuff is being taken away. So I've decided to spend
Speaker 2: some time focusing on these everyday miracles that we take
Speaker 2: for granted, things that our parents or grandparents might not
Speaker 2: have taken for granted, things that we can no longer
Speaker 2: take for granted. I want to talk about vaccines. Ooh, yes,
Speaker 2: I like vaccines. Vaccines are cool as hell, easily in
Speaker 2: the top five best things humans have come up with.
Speaker 2: I don't know the other four on that list are,
Speaker 2: but probably burritos. Specifically, I want to talk about the
Speaker 2: polio vaccines. And I'm going to use the plural here
Speaker 2: on purpose, because people talk about the polio vaccine as
Speaker 2: if there's one vaccine, and there is a whole wild
Speaker 2: history behind polio vaccines, and they have functionally, but not literally,
Speaker 2: eradicated polio. Have you heard much of this story?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: But I do have a friend who works at the CDC.
Speaker 3: She has not been fired yet, oh shit, yes, and
Speaker 3: she is the biggest proponent of vaccines. She like, if
Speaker 3: you catch her at a party, somehow vaccines will come up,
Speaker 3: and a polio vaccin. It's one of her favorite stories
Speaker 3: to tell. So I know it's got a history behind.
Speaker 2: It, and a different history than I thought it did.
Speaker 2: Because this week's story is going to follow an arc
Speaker 2: that is familiar to regular listeners of the show, and
Speaker 2: that Sophie and I spend a lot of our time
Speaker 2: complaining about in signal chats, which is that I start
Speaker 2: off researching, usually a guy who is famous for having
Speaker 2: accomplished something right, and then I spend a week researching.
Speaker 2: I read most of a biography, I'd read a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of other stuff. I get about ninety percent through
Speaker 2: my research. When I find out something that makes me
Speaker 2: have to change everything about the story.
Speaker 3: It happens all too often.
Speaker 2: It's so annoying. It has happened when I researched women before,
Speaker 2: but it happens all the time with men, where you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: and you're gonna like research this person and they're like, oh,
Speaker 2: they kind of we're a horrible monster to the people
Speaker 2: closest to them, or actually all of this is myth
Speaker 2: making and they're a con artist, or just like whatever
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, taking credit a lot of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of taking credit, you ever heard of a
Speaker 2: guy named Jonas salk.
Speaker 3: Have? Yes, this is.
Speaker 2: The man Sophia, you heard of this guy? No, I hadn't.
Speaker 2: And I think that, like you and I live under
Speaker 2: a specific rock, because like, at least everything I've read
Speaker 2: has been like, ah, yes, the most household name medicine
Speaker 2: person in the world. And I'm like, I've never heard
Speaker 2: of this man. Yeah, what have you heard of? Jonas Soak?
Speaker 2: Before I tell you about Jonahs Sak.
Speaker 3: I just knew he was involved in like medicine. I
Speaker 3: just have heard his name from my elementary school days.
Speaker 3: Perhaps that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jonas Sack, the man who defeated polio. He was
Speaker 2: a Jewish guy raised poor in New York City from
Speaker 2: a family of Eastern European immigrants. He worked his entire
Speaker 2: life to fight disease and make the world a better place,
Speaker 2: and along the way he became a sort of medical
Speaker 2: rock star for his work developing a polio vaccine. He
Speaker 2: is famous for saying he refused to patent this vaccine
Speaker 2: because the world needed it. He said in an interview quote,
Speaker 2: how can you patent the sun? And that what I
Speaker 2: just read you is true? Ish, It is so close
Speaker 2: to true that it is a massive fuck off. Lie.
Speaker 2: Is such a lie? Fascinating and I like, I learned
Speaker 2: that about seven hours ago.
Speaker 3: He learned something every day. I know, like the.
Speaker 2: Fact that the thing you've been researching for five days nonstuff,
Speaker 2: isn't it true.
Speaker 1: It's not even like true kind of it is.
Speaker 2: It's so true that it becomes a lie.
Speaker 1: Oh okay.
Speaker 2: He did develop a polio vaccine. He developed the first
Speaker 2: polio vaccine. The first functional one was we'll talk about it.
Speaker 2: He didn't. Actually, we'll get to it. Okay. The first
Speaker 2: polio vaccine that was widely tested is often called the
Speaker 2: Salk vaccine, and he worked to do that with a
Speaker 2: private anti communist foundation, one that claimed that public investment
Speaker 2: in research was how communism would win in America, so
Speaker 2: it couldn't be publicly funded. This is not reflecting the
Speaker 2: politics of Jonah Sauk himself, but this is the organization
Speaker 2: funded him. His vaccine saved uncountable lives, mostly white, middle
Speaker 2: and upper class lives in the United States of America. Then,
Speaker 2: another Eastern European Jewish man who also came up in
Speaker 2: New York City, developed a polio vaccine in partnership between
Speaker 2: American and Soviet scientists. This vaccine was cheap, more easily
Speaker 2: administered and really slightly more dangerous by one context and
Speaker 2: less dangerous by another context. That vaccine ended polio. After
Speaker 2: polio is a effectively destroyed, the US went back to
Speaker 2: Salks vaccine because when you have plenty of time and
Speaker 2: medical facilities and can do booster shots and all that stuff,
Speaker 2: Salks vaccine edges out a little bit. So it was
Speaker 2: not Jonas Salk who beat polio. It wasn't even Albert Sabin,
Speaker 2: who's this direct competitor, the one who I just said,
Speaker 2: because no one person beat polio. It was an enormous
Speaker 2: undertaking by thousands of researchers from across the world that
Speaker 2: beat polio. And the Great Man theory of history is
Speaker 2: once again a bunch of fucking garbage. And I didn't
Speaker 2: know most of that when I wrote it this fucking episode,
Speaker 2: So consider it a story about how myths are built.
Speaker 2: But first we're gonna talk about polio. I don't know
Speaker 2: anyone who's had polio to my knowledge, and that is
Speaker 2: because I was born after these vaccines. Poliomyelitis is a
Speaker 2: viral infection. Most infections are either bacterial or viral, and
Speaker 2: this one's viral. It has been around for kind of forever,
Speaker 2: at least thousands of years. It was first given a
Speaker 2: name in eighteenth century, and then it started really fucking
Speaker 2: people up in the nineteenth century. It actually the places
Speaker 2: that first really hit was Europe and then the United
Speaker 2: States in the nineteenth century. In nineteen oh eight or
Speaker 2: nineteen oh nine, I have read both. A guy actually
Speaker 2: looked really close and was like, I have seen the
Speaker 2: actual virus that does this, and that has got to
Speaker 2: be a strange time to be a scientist where you're like, ah,
Speaker 2: I am looking through a microscope and seeing the actual object.
Speaker 3: Yes, I can't imagine back in those days where you
Speaker 3: were just this looks different. I'm not sure why. Let
Speaker 3: me try to come up with some reason. Just the
Speaker 3: way we've understood viruses throughout time and how that's changed
Speaker 3: is fascinating to me. Honestly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, And I'm kind of excited about all the
Speaker 2: things that people are going to look back one hundred
Speaker 2: years from now if they're still alive in the world's
Speaker 2: and been cooked to death. But otherwise I'm like excited
Speaker 2: about all the things. I'll be like, remember when people
Speaker 2: thought the following, you know, right, Polio was absolutely terrifying
Speaker 2: to people. It barely causes any symptoms in most people,
Speaker 2: so it's easily transmitted. So like adults get it and
Speaker 2: transmit it, but they don't they're not affected by it,
Speaker 2: basically not. Most of the time, it is transmitted through
Speaker 2: the fecal oral route, which is there's just like different
Speaker 2: ways that you know, is the following think airborn. This
Speaker 2: is the kind of fun thing that's fun to talk
Speaker 2: about at parties. Actually, well, with your friend, it probably
Speaker 2: is fun to talk about a parties.
Speaker 3: She does love talking about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: My favorite thing I like bringing up is that hand
Speaker 2: sanitizer doesn't do anything for fecal oral routes diseases, and
Speaker 2: so you actually need to wash your hands after you
Speaker 2: go to the bathroom. You can't just like use hand sanitizer. Yeah,
Speaker 2: makes me real popular.
Speaker 3: Yeah, things are the fun things in life. You know.
Speaker 2: This is why I go to so many parties and
Speaker 2: I'm invited everywhere.
Speaker 1: That sounds like you, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: It is my goal to be invited to all the parties.
Speaker 2: It is not my goal to go to all the parties.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, one hundred percent. I want to be invited,
Speaker 1: but I'm not coming like please keep inviting me, because
Speaker 1: if you don't, I'll be really sad about it. But
Speaker 1: I'm not coming, I know, but if you're not reinvited,
Speaker 1: which is fair but still not okay, no, okay, oh okay.
Speaker 2: The best is when you have a friend where you
Speaker 2: can invite each other to things and you know it's
Speaker 2: safe because you know that both of you are gonna
Speaker 2: be like, eh, I gotta hang out with my dog today.
Speaker 3: Sorry, gotta have that like dog back burner.
Speaker 1: Excuse, yeah, totally, I am good, my favorite the like, Oh.
Speaker 2: My dog is just kind of needs to get home soon.
Speaker 2: My dog and I get socially exhausted. My dog has
Speaker 2: to record some podcasts in the morning.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 2: So polio almost exclusively affects children, and I'm going to
Speaker 2: get into it because polio might come back because of
Speaker 2: the motherfucker in charge of the fucking anyway, whatever, we'll
Speaker 2: get to that. When you first get polio, you get
Speaker 2: a runny nose and a sore throat. Then you get
Speaker 2: a fever, then horrible pain throughout all your muscles or
Speaker 2: some of your muscles, depending, leaving you thrashing and misery
Speaker 2: in your bed. Then when the fever breaks, it's not over.
Speaker 2: It means the virus is moved from the blood to
Speaker 2: the nervous system. Within a few days, your muscles become paralyzed,
Speaker 2: but your body doesn't go numb. You can still feel
Speaker 2: all your muscles, you just can't use them. Among people
Speaker 2: catch it symptomatically like this. I have read a ten
Speaker 2: percent mortality rate, and I have read a twenty five
Speaker 2: percent mortality rate. I believe the lower number. It kills
Speaker 2: you by paralyzing essential functions. If it goes up in
Speaker 2: your brain, you will stop being able to swallow. You'll
Speaker 2: foam at the mouth and drown.
Speaker 3: It's bad, It's really Yeah, that sounds terrible.
Speaker 2: You the listener have probably seen if you all seen
Speaker 2: the pictures of iron lungs. Yes, yes, so they have
Speaker 2: been used for other things. It's like, if your lungs
Speaker 2: are paralyzed, this is the object that would help you
Speaker 2: back in the day. Now we use intubation and other
Speaker 2: things more often, although iron lungs have come back thanks
Speaker 2: to COVID. Iron lungs are huge metal tubes that you
Speaker 2: go into with only your head sticking out, and the
Speaker 2: machine varies the air pressure, so it sort of breathes
Speaker 2: for you. Your head's not in it. But basically it's
Speaker 2: a like forces your chest to expand. It brings airs,
Speaker 2: and it's like manually working of bellows. If your lungs
Speaker 2: are paralyzed, you need this thing. Most people only spent
Speaker 2: about two weeks or a couple of months in the
Speaker 2: iron lung while recovering. But plenty of people and every
Speaker 2: time I say people, when I'm talking about polio, I'm
Speaker 2: talking about children. Plenty of children. Well, I guess in
Speaker 2: this case, people live their entire lives in iron lungs.
Speaker 2: There is one woman, Martha Lillard, who got polio nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty three when she was five years old, who was
Speaker 2: still alive as of when I looked, and still lives
Speaker 2: in one. And she's having trouble finding parts to keep
Speaker 2: her iron long in good repair because she's the only
Speaker 2: person living in one. Long term left people often regained
Speaker 2: some use of their muscles, but generally people were disabled
Speaker 2: for life, and polio scared the piss out of everyone.
Speaker 2: It was killing and paralyzing children. The most famous polio
Speaker 2: survivor is Franklin Roosevelt, the progressively served as President of
Speaker 2: this country for the longest and could scarcely walk and
Speaker 2: relied on leg bracestm wheelchairs. So in nineteen sixteen there
Speaker 2: was this massive polio outbreak in New York City. Basically,
Speaker 2: summertime in major cities was polio's time to shine. Babies
Speaker 2: were dying of polio at a fantastic and terrible rate,
Speaker 2: one every two and a half hours. Jesus Christ, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's too often. There's I've read so many stories about
Speaker 2: doctors who are like, I don't know, just like walking
Speaker 2: through these wards and just being like watching children dying constantly.
Speaker 2: And there's a lot of emotional stuff I didn't put
Speaker 2: in this part of it. It's transmission wasn't yet understood.
Speaker 2: People assumed it was airborne basically, and they tried everything
Speaker 2: to stop it. Families were quarantined, windows were screened to
Speaker 2: keep flies away, the trash got picked up extra well.
Speaker 2: Those two things actually probably helped them. Playgrounds were shut down.
Speaker 2: Kids had their noses and throats rinsed with salt water daily,
Speaker 2: which has got to be one of the worst things
Speaker 2: that I can imagine happening on a daily basis. Most tragically,
Speaker 2: seventy two thousand stray cats were killed by the city
Speaker 2: because people thought they spread it and none of it worked.
Speaker 2: But you know, it did work to save everyone who
Speaker 2: has polio, and Sophie, I think we can promise that
Speaker 2: all of the following people are capable of curing polio. Yeah,
Speaker 2: why not, it's our response. They're all legally capable of
Speaker 2: understanding what parody is and not getting mad about this
Speaker 2: ad transition. That's what they're capable of doing. Here's a
Speaker 2: bunch of ads, and we're back. But unfortunately, they didn't
Speaker 2: have the products that support this podcast yet, or they might.
Speaker 2: I don't know what we got advertised. Some of that
Speaker 2: stuff has been around for a while, but they didn't
Speaker 2: have enough of it. They didn't even have podcasts back then.
Speaker 2: They had to listen to people on soapboxes and radio.
Speaker 2: And actually we've been doing basically the equivalent of podcasts forever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, if you're thinking about a
Speaker 3: lot of this sounds like COVID to me, And I
Speaker 3: feel like the whole manosphere thing that happened during COVID,
Speaker 3: where people were isolated and they didn't have real information
Speaker 3: and they were just like, I don't know, I don't
Speaker 3: understand that a lot of negative things around health came
Speaker 3: out out of that, and it's still impacting us to
Speaker 3: this day, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of overlaps between this and like
Speaker 2: we will talk about some like really early anti vaxxers
Speaker 2: during this, But there was actually this thing where like
Speaker 2: it seems like from the reading that more people were
Speaker 2: willing to trust experts than like currently.
Speaker 3: That's fun. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2: People started fleeing the city. And to be clear, there's
Speaker 2: outbreaks everywhere, but New York City is like particularly bad.
Speaker 2: Twelve hundred kids a day escaped the city with their
Speaker 2: families for a little while, but then other cities soon
Speaker 2: stopped letting them come in. Kids and babies were taken
Speaker 2: to Kingston Avenue Hospital and quarantined for two months, away
Speaker 2: from their families, and then cops would go around and
Speaker 2: steal children from their families to take them to the
Speaker 2: hospit all. I only got one sentence of that, and
Speaker 2: I want to know more about what happened there. Was
Speaker 2: it like you got a runny nose, Now you got
Speaker 2: to go to the you know, quarantine, the death land.
Speaker 2: I don't know, the.
Speaker 3: Police are coming, you know, I have had a couple
Speaker 3: of instances where I have had something like swine flu,
Speaker 3: and basically they've been like, you're going to this quarantine zone.
Speaker 3: And I didn't know what was happening, and they just
Speaker 3: told me where to go.
Speaker 2: Wait, you've been quarantined by who. What happened?
Speaker 3: I was quarantined just multiple times. One time when I
Speaker 3: was flying into the US. That was when I had
Speaker 3: bird flu. One time at college when I had swine flu,
Speaker 3: uh huh, and they didn't want to report it because
Speaker 3: if they had to report it, they would have shut
Speaker 3: down the university. And then another time where a doctor
Speaker 3: was just like, please go home and quarantine.
Speaker 1: I feel really great about that. That made me really confident.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they basically were like, just don't tell Anyboddy, go
Speaker 3: back to your door.
Speaker 1: I feel really confident about the American education system. I
Speaker 1: feel like we're really setting the priority straight.
Speaker 3: They did give me a mask and some clothes and
Speaker 3: the instructions to stay in my room away from people
Speaker 3: for a couple of days.
Speaker 2: So college kids are notoriously good at following instruction.
Speaker 3: Definitely socializing. It was also Halloween. I remember very specifically
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: My Halloween costume is the person with mask and gloves.
Speaker 3: I did stay in my room.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 3: I did.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's good. So if there's ever like a new
Speaker 2: animal named flu, are you just personally convinced that you
Speaker 2: are going to get it? Kind of like once there's
Speaker 2: like a snake flu, I'm like staying away from you
Speaker 2: for a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think that's fair. I think that's a really fair response. Honestly.
Speaker 2: Well, just like the thing that saved you, the epidemics
Speaker 2: stopped because summer stopped. Two four hundred people, mostly kids
Speaker 2: under five, died in New York City that summer, and
Speaker 2: around nine thousand were paralyzed. Nationwide, twenty seven thousand kids
Speaker 2: died or paralyzed, and I don't know which because it
Speaker 2: was confusingly written, and I tried across reference, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't always work. It was a bad summer. Every summer
Speaker 2: across the world, polio came back, and it mostly slowly
Speaker 2: got worse. Fifteen thousand kids a year were disabled by
Speaker 2: polio in the United States, and is peaked in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty two. In the early nineteen fifties, the thing that
Speaker 2: most Americans were afraid of was nuclear war, which makes
Speaker 2: sense The second thing after that that they were the
Speaker 2: most afraid of was polio. And it's like one of
Speaker 2: those things where it's like polio's is like an old
Speaker 2: timey disease. You're like, oh, that could have been like
Speaker 2: that bad. We're still around as a species, and I've
Speaker 2: never met anyone in polio, you know, right, maybe most
Speaker 2: people are better at thinking things through than I would
Speaker 2: have been.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it had a huge impact though. I know
Speaker 3: we've talked about it, but in terms of like the
Speaker 3: ADA and all those kind of things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, one of the things that we're not going
Speaker 2: to get into too much, but the start of the
Speaker 2: disability rights movement and also the start of the concept
Speaker 2: of physical therapy. Yeah, comes out of polio. And of
Speaker 2: course that was done by a woman and isn't as
Speaker 2: written about as much. And then I'm as guilty as
Speaker 2: anyone else because instead I'm going to complain about a man.
Speaker 2: That's the main thing I'm gonna do this episode.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you know, sometimes you've just got to
Speaker 3: complain about a man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, under totally, totally. In nineteen fifty five, the polio vaccine,
Speaker 2: the first one was administered, and the way it's usually
Speaker 2: presented is that basically overnight polio dropped from disabling fifteen
Speaker 2: thousand kids a year to about one hundred cases a year.
Speaker 2: This isn't true. It did start turning the tide dramatically,
Speaker 2: but it wasn't until nineteen sixty two, I think when
Speaker 2: the other vaccine that we'll talk about later came in
Speaker 2: that it started dropping to one hundred cases a year.
Speaker 3: So was it a kind of marketing thing.
Speaker 2: It's that people want a simple history with a hero,
Speaker 2: and Jonas Salk, the guy that we're going to talk about,
Speaker 2: mostly was a hero. He stopped polio. You know, by
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy nine. Polio is effectively eliminated in the United
Speaker 2: States until the modern anti vax movement, which is basically
Speaker 2: a death cult.
Speaker 3: Uh huh.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty two, the US got some cases of
Speaker 2: polio for the first time since nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 3: Great, yeah, with RFK Junior charge moving forward, well, let's let's.
Speaker 2: Talk about that real quick. RFK Junior soon to be
Speaker 2: remembered as one of history's greatest monsters. Yes, he has
Speaker 2: gone on record to say that the polio vaccine has
Speaker 2: quote killed many, many, many, many many more people than
Speaker 2: polio ever did such an idiot uh huh wow, because
Speaker 2: he was like, oh, he like gives people cancer or something.
Speaker 2: And also he claims that the vaccine didn't actually reduce
Speaker 2: polio cases, that it is quote a mythology and quote
Speaker 2: just not true. Studies have shown, of course, that the
Speaker 2: polio vaccine does not cause cancer, and that polio has
Speaker 2: been pretty much completely eliminated worldwide because of these vaccines.
Speaker 2: Everyone of every political party who allowed RFK Junior to
Speaker 2: come to power has fucking blood on their hands. Yeah,
Speaker 2: polio is bad and it was real bad. And this
Speaker 2: is the story about people developing the vaccine, but it
Speaker 2: actually starts in its way with people fighting against the flu.
Speaker 2: So we're gonna talk about the flu real quick too.
Speaker 2: The flu is way harder to vaccinate against, although we
Speaker 2: do it fairly well. Regardless, people should get their flu shots.
Speaker 2: I never bothered because I was like, I'm young and
Speaker 2: can do whatever. And then I like have a doctor
Speaker 2: friend and he's like, that's not the point. The point
Speaker 2: is that if you don't get it, old people die.
Speaker 2: I'm also like closer and closer to an honorary old
Speaker 2: person myself, but yeah.
Speaker 3: I had the same thing where it's like I don't
Speaker 3: need it. It just kind of makes me feel a little
Speaker 3: off for a couple of days. Why should I get it?
Speaker 3: And then somebody sat me down and was like, it's
Speaker 3: not just about you. Yeah, yeah's kind of the point totally.
Speaker 2: And there's like some people who can't get the shot
Speaker 2: at all because they're immuno compromised. I think there's seventeen
Speaker 2: million people living in the US who have actual medical
Speaker 2: reasons that they can't get vaccinated, do an immunocompromisation. Whatever.
Speaker 2: We still successfully vaccinate against the flu, even though mutates
Speaker 2: all the time, which is why it's like less effective. Right.
Speaker 2: The polio vaccine was like good by polio, right, and
Speaker 2: we haven't been able to say good bye flu. Polio
Speaker 2: doesn't like to mutate all that much, but the flu
Speaker 2: mutates like it's its full time job. You have the
Speaker 2: polio outbreak of nineteen sixteen, and then you have the
Speaker 2: Spanish flu, which is the closest COVID parallel, especially because
Speaker 2: they wore masks and stuff. And this is a global
Speaker 2: pandemic from nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty, and this fucking
Speaker 2: thing killed like twenty five to fifty million people and
Speaker 2: a lot of people. Yeah. This was during World War One,
Speaker 2: and the Spanish flu was as good at killing soldiers
Speaker 2: as masked charges against machine guns was like World War
Speaker 2: One was like when we were really bad at understanding
Speaker 2: that you can't charge a machine gun, you know, and
Speaker 2: so they would be like, Oh, to send more young,
Speaker 2: poor people in front of that machine gun, that'll work.
Speaker 2: I think for actual soldiers, combat deaths edges out. I
Speaker 2: didn't write down the numbers, but they're in the running
Speaker 2: with each other. The thing that really scared people about
Speaker 2: the Spanish flu is that it was affecting healthier people
Speaker 2: than the flu usually did, and we didn't have the
Speaker 2: flu shot yet, but public health departments did their best.
Speaker 2: I think there's kind of this interesting thing where it's
Speaker 2: like people do try, you know, and you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: they did things wrong, and you're like, yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 2: they did things they Yeah, they did what was what
Speaker 2: they thought they could, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, going back to my friends who works in the
Speaker 3: health industry, they were trying to learn as much as
Speaker 3: they could about in this case, COVID, but it was
Speaker 3: constantly changing. They were getting new data. It was moving
Speaker 3: so quickly. I can only imagine back in nineteen seventeen, yeah,
Speaker 3: or nineteen thirteen. But yeah, yeah, in that area.
Speaker 2: In front of me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I memorized you know that, Yeah, that wasn't
Speaker 3: you didn't have ready access. Actually, that's kind of an
Speaker 3: interesting juxtaposition of like, in some cases I think that
Speaker 3: boone is having more access than maybe in other cases
Speaker 3: it's kind of a detriment, which is what we're seeing
Speaker 3: today in terms of you know, misinformation disformation. But oh yeah, totally,
Speaker 3: but not that that didn't exist before. But yeah, but
Speaker 3: she was saying that we were always trying to figure
Speaker 3: it out as quickly as we could to get solutions
Speaker 3: because there are also people who don't want their loved
Speaker 3: ones to die, I know.
Speaker 2: And it's like, oh, you said last week it was this,
Speaker 2: and you're like, yeah, you're aware that, Like the whole
Speaker 2: point of science is to change your mind as new
Speaker 2: information comes in, but then act on the best available
Speaker 2: information the entire time. Like that doesn't feel like a
Speaker 2: hard concept from my point of view.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, no, that makes total sense that you
Speaker 3: would get new information, take that in and then make
Speaker 3: your informed opinion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so in New York City, when the Spanish
Speaker 2: flu came. They basically built a social distancing infrastructure. They
Speaker 2: staggered business hours so that not everyone was on public
Speaker 2: transit at once. They got rid of rush hour in
Speaker 2: order to fight the flu. Oh wow, I wish they
Speaker 2: would just do that anyway, what am I saying? I
Speaker 2: live in the mountains. I haven't had to deal with
Speaker 2: rush hour, and like, I don't remember how many years
Speaker 2: they got.
Speaker 3: Well it's painful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's no one around. Yeah, like you like,
Speaker 2: we have to like wait for a tractor. That's the
Speaker 2: most annoying thing that I have to.
Speaker 3: Put up with, you know, hilarious.
Speaker 2: But then when you finally pass them, they're just like, oh, hey,
Speaker 2: how's it going, you know, give the wave. Yeah. They
Speaker 2: also got theaters to sell only half their seats to people,
Speaker 2: so you have an empty seat next to you. And
Speaker 2: people started covering their mouths when coughing, which was a
Speaker 2: new technology at the time.
Speaker 3: Wow, I love this. See I do the vampire cough.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, yeah, we've moved from hands to the yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Bodies piled up unburied, and in nineteen eighteen, twenty one
Speaker 2: thousand New York City children were orphaned, and that is
Speaker 2: the New York city that our main character of the
Speaker 2: week was born into, the one that his competitor would
Speaker 2: move to. Jonas Salk was called a hero, and he
Speaker 2: seemed to kind of revel in that identity. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of like arguments this is a man that there
Speaker 2: are hagiography is about. This is a man where they're like,
Speaker 2: either he's just a complete piece of garbage or like
Speaker 2: almost everything you read about it is like he's just
Speaker 2: basically the best. This is Jesus walking amongst us. You know,
Speaker 2: much like Jesus. He was Jewish, he was hard working
Speaker 2: as fuck, and he tirelessly worked to make the world better.
Speaker 2: He also wasn't the only person doing this work.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 2: Also, we'll get to this at the end. He was
Speaker 2: like a eugenicist and had really wild ideas and it
Speaker 2: was a real sketchy.
Speaker 3: Oh that's fun, Tea said.
Speaker 2: His wife dihorsed him and for pretty solid reasons. And anyway,
Speaker 2: we'll get to that.
Speaker 3: Did it go, girl, Yeah, you're a eugenicist. I think
Speaker 3: I should get out of it.
Speaker 2: I was like, yeah, yeah, And I think there were
Speaker 2: a lot of breakups around Trump's election, you know, I
Speaker 2: think that there was a lot of people who are like, oh,
Speaker 2: I could put up with my boyfriend until this is
Speaker 2: just the step too far, this is too real now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure I.
Speaker 2: Met someone who would that basically happened to and I
Speaker 2: don't feel bad for him at all, but I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm so sorry that you wait. Nope, never mind. Anyway,
Speaker 2: Jonahsok wasn't the only person doing this work around vaccines,
Speaker 2: and people have complained about him taking credit for more
Speaker 2: than his own work. And he started off his life
Speaker 2: as a leftist. He was actually investigated by the FBI
Speaker 2: for communist sympathies. Then he moved to a political and
Speaker 2: he wound up writing mystical eugenesis shit about how scientists
Speaker 2: should control the human race genetically by introducing viruses into
Speaker 2: people's embryos. That's the big medical hero the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: Jonas Salk. But one thing that Jonas Salk had access to, no,
Speaker 2: he didn't. Actually he raised very poor. Well, I bet
Speaker 2: some of our products and services were actually affordable. So
Speaker 2: probably because some of them are just losing your life
Speaker 2: to Anyway, here's some ads. I love all of them
Speaker 2: and have no complicated feelings about the nature of my work.
Speaker 2: Here they are. We're back and we're talking to Jonas
Speaker 2: Salk born with no middle name, but he's going to
Speaker 2: get one in an interesting way.
Speaker 3: Can't wait.
Speaker 2: That's my teaser. And it's not like me just adding
Speaker 2: a eugenicist in quotas the middle name or whatever. No,
Speaker 2: he actually gets an actual middle name. Jonah Salk was
Speaker 2: born on October twenty eighth, nineteen fourteen, in East Harlem
Speaker 2: in a tenement building. He was the first son of
Speaker 2: Dora and Daniel Salk. His mother was a Russian Jew
Speaker 2: from what's now Belarus. Her own parents had owned a
Speaker 2: tavern in Minsk. Dora came over to Manhattan with her
Speaker 2: family when she was thirteen, where she lived with others
Speaker 2: in the wildly overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side
Speaker 2: and worked in the garment industry, which was not known
Speaker 2: for good working conditions. And people who've listened to this
Speaker 2: show and order have much of a grasp know that
Speaker 2: the reason that Jews were leaving the Russian Empire is
Speaker 2: that the Pograms were real not nice. The family did
Speaker 2: fairly well for themselves, and Dora became a foreman at
Speaker 2: the you know, tenement of sewing garment industry whatever. I
Speaker 2: don't know the name of the place she worked, and
Speaker 2: the family moved to East Harlem, where like more people
Speaker 2: had like actual homes, but were still kind of crowded
Speaker 2: into them. This is a like move from like poverty
Speaker 2: to lower middle class. That's the best I can tell, Okay.
Speaker 2: Jonas's dad, Daniel, was a Lithuanian Jews born in the
Speaker 2: US and a lace maker who designed women's neckwear. He
Speaker 2: was quiet and humble. His mom was driven in loud.
Speaker 2: I have read so many biographies for this work where
Speaker 2: they just like really want to complain about overbearing moms,
Speaker 2: to the point where I actually just question everything about
Speaker 2: the way the history is presented.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the history of the overbearing mom, I
Speaker 3: always question it every time I see it.
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, in this case, Jonas likes his mom
Speaker 2: and appreciates that she was a taskmaster.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay.
Speaker 2: When they wound up with Jonas their eldest kid, mom
Speaker 2: was very active in directing his education and making sure
Speaker 2: he started reading right away. And shit, she became a
Speaker 2: stay at home mom and was apparently kind of domineering.
Speaker 2: Our boy, Jonas skipped a bunch of grades, was very quiet,
Speaker 2: ignored sports, and read books. He wasn't a very happy kid.
Speaker 2: His mother treated him like an adult pretty much right away.
Speaker 2: But he never blamed anything on his mother and said
Speaker 2: that he inherited her work ethic and is very grateful
Speaker 2: for it. And it is important to this story that
Speaker 2: he is a Jewish kid, the child of an immigrant.
Speaker 2: His Judaism is important to his work. He's not necessarily
Speaker 2: like super observant near the end of his life as
Speaker 2: a kid, he is, but though like cultural and sort
Speaker 2: of theological underpinions remain important to him. I believe his
Speaker 2: entire life he consciously accepts the Jewish obligation of takun alum,
Speaker 2: which is repairing the world. You have an obligation to
Speaker 2: make the world a better place, which is I think
Speaker 2: cool as hell, although obviously people can interpret that to
Speaker 2: me and I want to inject viruses and the children
Speaker 2: to make them have different you know, genetic structures. But
Speaker 2: first he just saves millions of lives.
Speaker 3: Right, you know, at this level.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he doesn't do any of the philosophical stuff
Speaker 2: he dreams of later. So the thing he practically.
Speaker 3: Does, it just seems a dream he has in his head.
Speaker 2: I like went back and forth like four times already.
Speaker 2: I had a moment where I was like, do I
Speaker 2: have to just scrap this and styling, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: he's just actually complicated and overall not looking great, but
Speaker 2: he's still interesting. Early on, he decides that he wants
Speaker 2: to work relieving the suffering of the sick and the injured.
Speaker 2: And there's so much myth making about this guy, and
Speaker 2: like there's like things you'll read where he's like he
Speaker 2: saw the nineteen sixteen and nineteen eighteen pandemics, and I'm like, no,
Speaker 2: he didn't. He was like three years old. He did, though,
Speaker 2: grow up in the wake of those crises, and he
Speaker 2: absolutely grew up knowing people who were paralyzed and dealing
Speaker 2: with a lot of disability as a result of folio.
Speaker 2: When he was twelve, he went to an all boys
Speaker 2: prep school for City College. This school is free, but
Speaker 2: it's incredibly hard to get into, which means that it's
Speaker 2: mostly the children of immigrants who go there, and especially
Speaker 2: Jewish immigrants based on the demographics of New York at
Speaker 2: the time. I like grew up so outside of this concept.
Speaker 2: This place is is like preppy I like didn't understand
Speaker 2: what a prep school was. This place is as preppy
Speaker 2: as a prep school can prep. Their school newspaper is
Speaker 2: in Latin.
Speaker 3: Oh okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is more of a humanities school than a
Speaker 2: stem school. And once he was there, he did not
Speaker 2: stand out. He was class secretary, but not class president.
Speaker 2: The only thing that stood out about him was that
Speaker 2: he was a sharp dresser. He was quiet and dedicated
Speaker 2: and figured he'd become a lawyer or a politician to
Speaker 2: make the world better. Once again, politicians famously always making
Speaker 2: the world better.
Speaker 3: Definitely. Also just like I guess I'll just be a lawyer, yeah,
Speaker 3: or a politician.
Speaker 2: Yeah, whatever ever makes the world better. One of those
Speaker 2: things I don't know. Yes, he was a prep school nerd.
Speaker 2: He was in the Current History Society, and he was
Speaker 2: in the Law and Debate Society. Oh wow, the Law
Speaker 2: and Debate Society is one society. So that sounds extra miserable.
Speaker 3: That sounds really intense. Yeah, law and debate, yeah, not
Speaker 3: just debate. Yeah, we must have the law.
Speaker 2: Whoever wins the debate gets to tell everyone who lives
Speaker 2: and dies, so it's going to be totally normal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2: He was the advertising manager for the yearbook and assistant
Speaker 2: business manager of the school paper. They get a picture
Speaker 2: of this guy, you're just like, he doesn't have a
Speaker 2: lot of friends, Like, no one hates him. He's just there,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was doing a lot. We must say it was.
Speaker 2: You want to guess what year he started college?
Speaker 3: No, yeah, he least.
Speaker 2: Don't make me he was fifteen years old when he
Speaker 2: started college, because of course he fucking was.
Speaker 3: Oh gosh.
Speaker 2: He went to City College, which is what it was
Speaker 2: a prep school for that he went to. And City
Speaker 2: College was prestigious and free, and it was also eighty
Speaker 2: percent Jewish because it was the place that immigrant kids
Speaker 2: can go to. He barely made any friends. He was
Speaker 2: going to do pre law, but then his mom was like, no,
Speaker 2: you'd be terrible as a lawyer. You can't even beat
Speaker 2: me in an argument, ow because he's not very like assertive,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he went into pre med and then his
Speaker 2: mom was like, now you're too weak to be a doctor.
Speaker 2: You should be a teacher.
Speaker 1: Mom, sounds fun.
Speaker 2: And he stood up for himself again he's myth making
Speaker 2: against his overbearon mom, who he actually loved. He was like, no,
Speaker 2: I like medicine.
Speaker 1: He doesn't have a wife to blame at this point.
Speaker 2: But he will have a wife to blame soon, don't worry. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: give it to that.
Speaker 1: Men like this always have some woman where like it
Speaker 1: was her.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. He was like, I'm going to do medicine,
Speaker 2: but I don't want to be a doctor. I want
Speaker 2: to do medical science. He had read a book about
Speaker 2: Louis Pasteur, the guy who did one a vaccine or whatever,
Speaker 2: and he was like, all right, vaccines and shit, that's
Speaker 2: my fucking thing. The problem with this, there's this free
Speaker 2: school and it's full of Jewish immigrant kids, is that
Speaker 2: higher education was anti Semitic and had informal caps on
Speaker 2: the number of Jewish kids admitted. So it was very
Speaker 2: hard for the city college kids to get into higher schools,
Speaker 2: like once they finished their undergrad This entire establishment was
Speaker 2: built and funded to help the children of immigrants, but
Speaker 2: there's like a serious glass ceiling put into place by
Speaker 2: WASP America. So Jonah Sulk applied everywhere and every place
Speaker 2: rejected him. Mixed one. So we went to what's now
Speaker 2: called the New York University College of Medicine. His interest
Speaker 2: was in medical research and so people were like, just
Speaker 2: get a PhD instead of an MD, and he was like, no,
Speaker 2: I'm going to be a doctor, just a research doctor.
Speaker 2: And in this new school he was entirely unremarkable and forgettable.
Speaker 2: He barely made any friends. He lived at home with
Speaker 2: his overbearing mom. Sorry anyway, oh god. He had to
Speaker 2: find work to pay for school. So we started working
Speaker 2: in research, and he was good at medical research right away.
Speaker 2: If you were interested in animal rights, this man is
Speaker 2: not a hero.
Speaker 3: I was just one of the many maybe categories we
Speaker 3: can say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that one's like a style at the time thing,
Speaker 2: and like animal testing is a complicated subject that I
Speaker 2: don't want to get into the morality of anyway, whatever,
Speaker 2: he starts working in research, and he is good at
Speaker 2: this shit right away. His second research project was to
Speaker 2: cultivate scarlet fever, or rather the bacteria that causes it,
Speaker 2: and give rabbit scarlet fever. He improved the process of
Speaker 2: cultivating bacteria, speeding it up by a factor of seven,
Speaker 2: and got his first paper published in an academic journal
Speaker 2: when he was twenty two. So this is like kind
Speaker 2: of the first time he's like really like standing out, you.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, is overbearing mom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're all doing air quotes this whole time. I
Speaker 2: think everyone can hear it in our voices.
Speaker 3: I hope you can hear it an air quote. Yeah,
Speaker 3: has been like, you're not good at this, You're not
Speaker 3: good at this. He's been a part of all these
Speaker 3: organizations and now has something that he feels good at.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's really painting a picture of somebody who was trying
Speaker 3: a bunch of things and looking for the one thing
Speaker 3: that they would really excel at.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. He's good at this stuff. He might not
Speaker 2: be as groundbreaking as people later paint him, but he
Speaker 2: is genuinely good at this stuff. And when he gets
Speaker 2: interested in vaccines, there are a few bacterial vaccines and
Speaker 2: a few viral vaccines around, and bacterial vaccines can be
Speaker 2: made using dead bacteria, but viral vaccines at the time,
Speaker 2: like for smallpox, rabies, and yellow fever, they had to
Speaker 2: be made out of weakened but live viruses. So you
Speaker 2: isolate a virus, beat it up, tell it that it's
Speaker 2: no good, never going to amount to anything, and then
Speaker 2: you inject that into someone and this is seen as
Speaker 2: an axiom. Viral infections can only be vaccinated against by
Speaker 2: live viruses and live virus vaccines are inherently a bit riskier.
Speaker 2: People still use them, and actually it's going to be
Speaker 2: a live virus that's going to actually get rid of folio.
Speaker 2: Live vaccines are more likely to provide lifelong immunity. You
Speaker 2: and everyone listening to this as likely had both, and
Speaker 2: if you haven't, then get mad at your parents for
Speaker 2: not vaccinating you and go get vaccinated. But live vaccines
Speaker 2: are not always appropriate. The flu shot we use now
Speaker 2: is an inactive vaccine. It's a dead virus vaccine. And
Speaker 2: Jonas Sulk is part of why we get the flu shot.
Speaker 2: He was working for a virologist named Thomas Francis Junior,
Speaker 2: who was the first man to isolate the flu virus
Speaker 2: and later who developed the flu shot, or led the
Speaker 2: research team that developed the flu shot. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of I mean, no one's like writing hagiographies about him,
Speaker 2: but you know he's part of a team. Thomas had
Speaker 2: Jonas try to stimulate antibodies in mice with that flu virus.
Speaker 2: The basic idea of vaccines, which people probably know, but
Speaker 2: in case you don't, say, either contain antibodies to a
Speaker 2: viral or bacterial infection or they convince your body to
Speaker 2: make its own antibodies, which is even better. So Jonas
Speaker 2: is working to stimulate antibodies in mice with dead flu
Speaker 2: virus like a normal person who has normal hobbies. I'm
Speaker 2: actually gratefully did this. I'm not complaining.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, he fell for a woman named Donna Lindsay, who
Speaker 2: was an inch taller than him and from a rich
Speaker 2: family and was pursuing her master's in social work at
Speaker 2: this point. They're both leftists, and they shared a desire
Speaker 2: to make the world better. This does not sound like
Speaker 2: a really great romance. He was completely smitten with her
Speaker 2: and she was like, I don't know. And I've read
Speaker 2: it described in multiple places as he basically kind of
Speaker 2: wore her down until she was like final, marry you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. She was like I don't need you. I'm good.
Speaker 2: But he yeah, he persisted, which means that she's going
Speaker 2: to have to like give up her career and like
Speaker 2: raise their kids, and like it was a you know,
Speaker 2: it was the early twentieth century.
Speaker 3: It was like the type of romances that we still
Speaker 3: unfortunate sometimes paint romantically, but at the time was very
Speaker 3: romantic of just a man being like I got her eventually,
Speaker 3: I wore her dad. Yeah, she saw how smart I was.
Speaker 3: I'm not a nerd.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Well, and he's like, she's so beautiful, and
Speaker 2: she's always like he's all right, I don't know. He
Speaker 2: graduated on June eighth, nineteen thirty nine, and he and
Speaker 2: Donna got married on June ninth, nineteen thirty nine, the
Speaker 2: very next day. And the reason it happened in this
Speaker 2: order is that she's from this like wealthy Jewish family,
Speaker 2: and his parents don't like that her family isn't really
Speaker 2: practicing Jewish, but her family doesn't like that his family
Speaker 2: is poor. Donna's dad is already pretty mad that his
Speaker 2: daughter is marrying below her station, so he insisted that
Speaker 2: it be done after he graduated, so that the announcement
Speaker 2: could say Jonas Edward Sulk MD. And you might be
Speaker 2: thinking to yourself, but doesn't he not have a middle name? Well,
Speaker 2: Donna's dad was mad that Jonas didn't have a middle
Speaker 2: name had not been properly anglicized, so he insisted that
Speaker 2: Jonas take Edward as a middle name. So he gets
Speaker 2: his middle name from his father in law, who's like,
Speaker 2: you are an Edward.
Speaker 3: Wow, there's also something to be said about you know what,
Speaker 3: the day after you graduate, we're just going to take
Speaker 3: out all the air out of what you.
Speaker 2: Did, Yeah and put it here totally, totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a real move. Okay.
Speaker 2: So he's married now and I think he moves out
Speaker 2: of the house. He has a two year internship at
Speaker 2: a research hospital and he wanted to keep doing virology,
Speaker 2: but he was Jewish and he wasn't from an ivy league,
Speaker 2: so he kept getting turned down everywhere. Hill His former supervisor,
Speaker 2: Thomas Franz and Junior, the guy who had him testing
Speaker 2: dead viruses on mice, brought him out to ann Arbor,
Speaker 2: Michigan to keep working on influenza. Eventually, Donna's going to
Speaker 2: be like, I'm you can't just fucking drag me all
Speaker 2: over the country for your shitty fucking research and then
Speaker 2: ignore me all the time. But that hasn't happened yet,
Speaker 2: and he like never talked about her or their relationship,
Speaker 2: like would be shocked to know anyway, they're out ann Arbor,
Speaker 2: Thomas Francis Junior and some others had developed a vaccine
Speaker 2: ready for human trials for the first time for the
Speaker 2: flu shot and the lab rats that they were going
Speaker 2: to use for this were patients at state hospitals for
Speaker 2: people with severe mental illnesses who were not in any
Speaker 2: way able to provide meaningful consent.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I love that.
Speaker 2: History is a nightmare land.
Speaker 3: Yah okay.
Speaker 2: Jonas Salk spoke at the end of his life about
Speaker 2: the importance of taking calculate risks in order to advance science.
Speaker 2: He seemed to genuinely consider the human costs of those risks,
Speaker 2: but he sure took a lot of them. He oversaw
Speaker 2: eight thousand patients who got the vaccine or a placebo.
Speaker 2: Antibodies went up, but there was no flu that season,
Speaker 2: so they couldn't really prove anything. So they were like, ah,
Speaker 2: the problem is that none of these people got the flu.
Speaker 2: Option A, Oh, no way to hear. Option B. Take
Speaker 2: infected mouse lung tissue and spray it into people's noses
Speaker 2: who are not able to consent because they have severe
Speaker 2: mental illnesses and rewards of the state. He goes for
Speaker 2: Option B.
Speaker 3: Yep, that's what I was afraid of. Yeah.
Speaker 2: This kind of thing did not fall out of style
Speaker 2: until the Nuremberg Trials of nineteen forty seven, when people
Speaker 2: were like, maybe there should be ethical standards for testing
Speaker 2: on people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe there's a lot of stuff that the Nazis
Speaker 3: did that was kind of just what everyone in the
Speaker 3: West was doing, but cranked up like three notches.
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, and it made everyone feel like, oh,
Speaker 2: were we doing.
Speaker 3: Let's really go for it. Yeah, if we're gonna do it,
Speaker 3: let's just go yeah, and made everybody else be like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: You'd think they'd be like, maybe this eugenics thing is
Speaker 2: no good, but it actually took decades before the West
Speaker 2: got over their obsession with eugenics. Some people like Sock
Speaker 2: died obsessed with I don't know if he defined what
Speaker 2: he did as eugenics. I couldn't actually find the answer
Speaker 2: to that, but we'll talk about that later. This worked,
Speaker 2: the flu shots and the giving people the flu without
Speaker 2: their permission. The control group got the flu at about
Speaker 2: fifty percent, while the vaccinated folks got it at sixteen percent,
Speaker 2: so it was very effective at stopping the flu that year.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty three, they got to show the world
Speaker 2: that they'd done good as a flu epidemic spread. Twelve
Speaker 2: five hundred soldiers were put into a try no need
Speaker 2: to spray infected mouse lungs into their noses because there's
Speaker 2: actually a flu this year and only two percent of
Speaker 2: the inoculated folks got sick, and the mental patients who
Speaker 2: had been tested on the year before were still immune.
Speaker 2: So dead viruses can work. And that's where we're going
Speaker 2: to leave it today. Our hero is doing great things.
Speaker 2: It's just messy. This is just like like he's not
Speaker 2: in any way acting abnormally to what he does for
Speaker 2: work at this point, and that's just an indictment of
Speaker 2: people refusing to think about ethics.
Speaker 3: Wow, well, I'm very eager to see the downfall of
Speaker 3: this year. Oh that doesn't happen like the teas of
Speaker 3: the downfall.
Speaker 2: No, he die as a hero.
Speaker 3: Ah Okay.
Speaker 2: I started researching him because people painted a real pretty
Speaker 2: picture of him, and I was like, he's going to
Speaker 2: win to cover because you can paint a real pretty
Speaker 2: picture of this man. And like maybe this is just
Speaker 2: like a no Heroes moment right where you're like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: whoever does this kind of work is going to have
Speaker 2: a willingness to hurt people to help people in a
Speaker 2: way that is like morally messy. But I still kind
Speaker 2: of come down on this particular guy not so great.
Speaker 3: In the end, I think taking in the complexities of
Speaker 3: anybody is good. Yeah, and then like science, weighing the
Speaker 3: information you get and forming your opinion.
Speaker 2: Ah, all right, well instead of telling the listener what
Speaker 2: to think about this man, you mean, I should just
Speaker 2: continue to explain this story and then interesting. Although I
Speaker 2: didn't name this cool people did cool stuff, so I
Speaker 2: always feel like I got to kind of specifically be like,
Speaker 2: this man is not worthy of the title. But the
Speaker 2: thing that happened, the creation of a polio vaccine is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that's also complicated, you know, was just called
Speaker 3: cool stuff too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, it's just cool stuff. Well, if people are like,
Speaker 2: but I want to hear you any Reese on the
Speaker 2: podcast more, but I don't want to wait till Wednesday.
Speaker 2: What can they do?
Speaker 3: Well, you can find me on stuff when I ever
Speaker 3: told you, or savor wherever you get your podcast and
Speaker 3: I'm out and about but not really yeah, fair enough,
Speaker 3: I don't even know why say yeah, but yes, you
Speaker 3: can find me there.
Speaker 2: I finally post on Instagram like yesterday, being like I'm
Speaker 2: not checking Dmazon here anymore. I am so tired of
Speaker 2: meta with a company.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 2: That's where I am still on Blue Sky. You can
Speaker 2: find me there. I'm on Substack find me there. And
Speaker 2: podcasts and also what podcast I listened to this week
Speaker 2: that I was like, I can't wait to plug this one.
Speaker 3: On air now.
Speaker 2: I don't remember what it was. I don't know. Sorry,
Speaker 2: it was probably sixteenth minute, but I don't even remember
Speaker 2: what the most recent sixteenth minute was.
Speaker 1: So it's about the Hawk Tua sec scandal.
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean I did listen to that, but I.
Speaker 1: Was like, that doesn't seem like something you'd be like, wow, wow,
Speaker 1: wow about really great episode by the way she.
Speaker 2: Listened, it is a good episode. Good yeah, and it
Speaker 2: was a good update to it.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but like financial scandal, not really your
Speaker 1: What was the.
Speaker 2: Most recent Hood Politics?
Speaker 3: Maybe? Is that politics?
Speaker 1: A great show?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Well, listen to Hood Politics with prop and sixteenth minute
Speaker 2: and everything else from cool Zone Media and everything else
Speaker 2: that Annie Reese does, and listen to all of it
Speaker 2: before Wednesday, because I will be quizzing you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, hi everyone? Ye.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.