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Dr. Peter Salk with a portrait of his father, Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed a polio vaccine in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.
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‘He would have been shocked’ - Dr. Peter Salk, son of polio vaccine’s developer, speaks on COVID hesitancy

Howard Lipin, courtesy San Diego Union-Tribune

‘He would have been shocked’ - Dr. Peter Salk, son of polio vaccine’s developer, speaks on COVID hesitancy

When the polio vaccine was deemed safe and effective in 1955, newspapers boldly declared an end to one of the period’s most-feared illnesses. 

But to get to that point, the vaccine went through various trials, including one where over 600,000 children were volunteered by their parents to participate. 

Dr. Jonas Salk, the developer of the vaccine who spent years perfecting it at the University of Pittsburgh, would even administer a trial dose to his son, Peter. 

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Now 77 and the president of a foundation devoted to his father’s legacy, Dr. Peter Salk told the Post-Gazette in an interview that he sees the public’s widespread willingness to take the polio vaccine as a mark of more innocent times. 

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One year after the first COVID-19 vaccines were publicly administered, the U.S. population is just 61% fully vaccinated.

According to Dr. Salk, a blend of political and cultural influences are to blame for the public’s waning trust in modern medicine. 

Of how his father, who died in 1995, would react to vaccine hesitancy today, Dr. Salk said “he would have been shocked.” 

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“It’s such a contrast to the environment he grew up in, and to the experience with those initial vaccines,” Dr. Salk said in a phone interview. In his father’s day, the public tended to trust public health advice. Today, “we’ve got the internet,” he said, which allows ideas to take hold that might seem “totally crazy and bonkers, yet people get caught up in it.” 

“These things spread, and really that’s a viral illness of its own — the disinformation that riles up these kinds of sentiments,” he added. 

Like his father, Dr. Salk is connected to the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a part-time professor of infectious diseases and microbiology. Given his expertise, he sees the COVID-19 vaccination effort as a “mixed success.” 

“The ‘mixed’ part is the problem,” he explained. “We’re dealing with two things — we’re dealing with the reality of this disease, and we’re dealing with the reality of human beings and their behavior, beliefs, feelings and interactions.”

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Those beliefs can directly affect people’s decisions about whether to vaccinate their children. According to national KFF polling, 30% of parents with children between the ages of 12 to 17 said their child had received one dose of the COVID vaccine as of late November. 

In similar polls, just 16% percent of parents of children aged five to 11 said their child had received a dose — and 29% of these parents say they never will. 

Those figures are a sharp contrast from the polio vaccination effort in 1955, when just three years earlier, 60,000 children caught the disease and 3,000 of them died. By 1961, millions of administered vaccine doses had eliminated 97% of cases.

“I think the factors coming to my mind are innocence on the one hand, and need,” Dr. Salk said of the polio vaccine effort. “There’s no question, this was horrible, and we wanted our kids protected.”

Still, Dr. Salk mentioned that anti-vaccine sentiments have been around since the first smallpox vaccine centuries ago. 

In the years before Jonas Salk’s vaccine was approved, the media stoked concern over its use of an inactive, “killed” polio virus, as opposed to a weakened live virus that was accepted at the time to be more effective.

Dr. Salk added that racially abusive studies like the Tuskegee experiment, which denied syphilis treatment to a group of Black Americans, also lowered trust among communities. 

“Roll back several hundred years, and you still have anti-vaxxers that were problematic, but there wasn’t any organized effort,” Dr. Salk said. ”People might have been scared, who knows what distrust of medicine and ease of access. Nevertheless, people believed in science. They believed in the beneficence of the powers that be that were making something available that was going to make a difference.”

While America’s vaccination rate lags behind that of other Western nations, Dr. Salk believes a reversal of the pandemic at home is directly tied to the global vaccination effort.

According to New York Times data, 48% of the world’s population has received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Dec. 19, with the threat of the potentially vaccine-resistant omicron variant stoking fears of more cases and deaths.

“We’ve got a virus that’s continuing to evolve. It’s evolving in part because we haven’t risen to meet the needs of the world, as well as our own country, in terms of getting enough blanket immunization protection to help keep new variants from forming,” Dr. Salk said. 

He added that while almost half of the world may be vaccinated, distribution is unequal. In Africa, for example, the rate of fully-vaccinated individuals is just 7%. 

“We need to not be entirely insular in our thinking,” Dr. Salk said. “Yes, we need to be thinking about our own country, but we also need to be understanding that we’ve got a whole world here.”

Looking forward, Dr. Salk said it’s impossible to say whether COVID-19 will be mostly eradicated, like polio, or whether the world must learn to manage it. 

“We ought to be able to keep on top of this from the scientific side,” he said. “We ought to be able to tailor immunological interventions, vaccines that would keep things at bay in a sense. This virus is always going to be trying to get around our defenses.” 

The mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 vaccines, undiscovered during his father’s time, he called “extraordinary.”

Approved for the public one year after cases were first discovered, the vaccine’s mRNA technology uses genetic material from the coronavirus to train the body to recognize an attack. While the method was studied by the National Institutes of Health for some time, the COVID-19 vaccine was the first mRNA vaccine used outside of clinical trials. 

“Basically, pandemics in past centuries over the course of time have made changes in culture, and this is an opportunity to rethink some things,” Dr. Salk said, “for us to make some constructive changes on the deepest levels of our society, that will help to put us in a better position in all respects, not just in terms of infectious diseases.”

Dr. Salk added this kind of thinking was not lost on his father, a man who notably said “our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors” and refused to patent the polio vaccine, forgoing any profit. 

“Do we need to continue to depend on the kind of things we as a species have relied on in the past to guide our lives?” Dr. Salk asked, “or is it possible that there can be some catalytic events that help us forge a new, and more constructive, interactive way of moving into the future?” 

Jesse Bunch: jbunch@post-gazette.com 

First Published: December 26, 2021, 11:00 a.m.

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Dr. Peter Salk with a portrait of his father, Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed a polio vaccine in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.  (Howard Lipin, courtesy San Diego Union-Tribune)
Howard Lipin, courtesy San Diego Union-Tribune
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