Vaccine Safety

Seldom had the U.S. seen its scientists in sharper public disagreement--and on a matter so immediately involving the health of millions. After a closed huddle in Manhattan, a committee of 26 polio and public-health experts last week publicly agreed with the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis that inoculations of Salk vaccine should continue through the summer polio season. The probable benefits, the committee reasoned, outweighed the possible hazards. In Washington four days later, Tennessee's James Percy Priest called 15 topflight vaccine experts before the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Subcommittee on Health and Science and got some quite different answers.

Cincinnati's respected Dr. Albert Sabin (TIME, May 23), long the foremost critic of vaccines made (like Salk's) of inactivated virus, urged that both production and inoculation be stopped until the vaccine can be made consistently safe.* He was supported by men of impressive professional caliber: Nobel Prizewinner John F. Enders of Boston's Children's Medical Center and Dr. William McD. Hammon, an epidemiologist who rubs elbows with Dr. Salk at the University of Pittsburgh.

The entire panel agreed that one step toward consistent safety would be the elimination of the virulent Mahoney strain of virus. (This would certainly take months, possibly years.) By nose count, the Salk program car ried again. When Chairman Priest got Yale's Professor John R. Paul (School of Medicine) to poll the panel of 15 experts, the result was 8 to 3 in favor of going on with Salk inoculations, and four abstentions (including Dr. Salk himself). Surgeon General Leonard A. Scheele hurried forward with a statement reaffirming his endorsement of continued manufacture and vaccination. Nonetheless, the question at the end of the hearing was the same as at the start: Can a safe Salk vaccine be consistently produced? Nobody bothered to ask the Canadians, but they had what seemed the answer: yes, if the vaccine is made in small enough quantities in laboratories following rigid university standards. Canada had made up its governmental mind last fall to do this, so there was no last-minute flap north of the border as there was in the U.S. And nobody tried to hurry the production. The University of Toronto's Connaught Medical Research Laboratories (TIME, March 29, 1954) did the job without fuss and feathers. Then the federal and provincial governments jointly gave the vaccine for youngsters in the first three grades.

By last week, 900,000 Canadian youngsters had been inoculated without a single proved case of polio resulting from the vaccine. The greatest and most significant technical difference between U.S. and Canadian methods was that all vaccinations in Canada had been given by subcutaneous (under the skin) injection. This greatly lessened the likelihood that paralytic polio would be provoked by jaBbing a needle into muscle and nerves.

In Toronto last week, as Canadian medicos got together with their British cousins at the joint meetings of British, Canadian and Ontario medical associations, they found it hard not to be smug. (The British are not using the Salk vaccine at all, except in a limited test.) Admitted the Canadians gallantly: "With a larger number of children vaccinated, we might have got into trouble, too." Said Dr. Andrew J. Rhodes, one of Canada's top polio experts: "A safe and effective vaccine can be produced. [But] a great deal of work has yet to be done."

* Stung by Dr. Sabin's attack, Foundation President Basil O'Connor snapped: "Old stuff." The Cincinnati researcher, he tartly recalled, has received $853,314.71 in grants from the foundation, which will continue to support him.

But O'Connor pleaded: "Let's not have the Salk vaccine talked to death."

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