Vaccination Myth #6:

"Polio was one of the clearly great vaccination success stories..."

...or was it?

Six New England states reported increases in polio one year after the Salk vaccine was introduced, ranging from more than doubling in Vermont to Massachusetts' astounding increase of 642%; other states reported increases as well.

The incidence in Wisconsin increased by a factor of five. Idaho and Utah actually halted vaccination due to the increased incidence and death rate. In 1959, 77.5% of Massachusetts' paralytic cases had received 3 doses of IPV (injected polio vaccine).

During 1962 U.S. Congressional hearings, Dr. Bernard Greenberg, head of the Dept. of Biostatistics for the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, testified that not only did the cases of polio increase substantially after mandatory vaccinations -- a 50% increase from 1957 to 1958, and an 80% increase from 1958 to 1959-but that the statistics were deliberately manipulated by the Public Health Service to give the opposite impression.

It is important to understand that the polio vaccine was not universally accepted, at least initially. Despite this, polio declined both in European countries that refused mass vaccination as well as in those that employed it.

According to researcher-author Dr. Viera Scheibner, 90% of polio cases were eliminated from statistics by health authorities' redefinition of the disease when the vaccine was introduced, while in reality the Salk vaccine was continuing to cause paralytic polio in several countries at a time when there were no epidemics being caused by the wild virus.

For example, cases of viral and aseptic meningitis, which have symptoms similar to polio, were routinely diagnosed and recorded as polio before the vaccine, but were distinguished and removed from polio statistics after the vaccine.

Also, the number of cases needed to declare an epidemic was raised from 20 to 35, and the requirement for inclusion in paralysis statistics was changed from symptoms that lasted for 24 hours to symptoms lasting 60 days (many polio victims' paralysis was temporary).

It is no wonder that polio decreased radically after vaccines-at least on paper. In 1985, the CDC reported that 87% of the cases of polio in the US between 1973 and 1983 were caused by the vaccine, and later declared that all but a few imported cases since were caused by the vaccine-and most of the imported cases occurred in fully vaccinated individuals.

Jonas Salk, inventor of the IPV, testified before a Senate subcommittee that nearly all polio outbreaks since 1961 were caused by the oral polio vaccine.

At a workshop on polio vaccines sponsored by the Institute of Medicine and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Samuel Katz of Duke University cited the estimated 8-10 annual US cases of vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP) in people who have taken the oral polio vaccine, and the [four year] absence of wild polio from the western hemisphere.

Jessica Scheer of the National Rehabilitation Hospital Research Center in Washington, D.C., pointed out that most parents are unaware that polio vaccination in this country entails "a small number of human sacrifices each year."

Compounding this contradiction are low adverse event reporting and the NVIC's experiences with confirming and correcting misdiagnoses of vaccine reactions, which suggest that the actual number of VAPP "sacrifices" may be 10 to 100 times higher than that cited by the CDC. For these reasons, the live polio virus is no longer in widespread use.

To be sure, polio as it was known in the first half of the 20th century does not exist today. However, declines following polio peaks in the late 1940's and early 1950's had been underway again for a period of years by the time the vaccine was introduced.

Vaccination Truth #6:

"The polio vaccine temporarily reversed disease declines that were underway before the vaccine was introduced; this fact was deliberately covered up by health authorities. In Europe, polio declined in countries that both embraced and rejected the vaccine."