Vaccinating

In 1955, one week before the death of Albert Einstein and two weeks before i was born, the final test was completed on the polio vaccine of Jonas Salk, and it was pronounced ready for manufacture and distribution. Unfortunately, much of the first batch was contaminated with live polio virus, and tens of thousands of Americas contracted polio after having received the vaccine. Dr. Salk said that for the first and only time in his life, he felt suicidal, even though he of course was blameless. This disaster, now largely forgotten, spurred a widespread public distrust of science, and vaccines in particular, which slowed the process even further. During the summers of 1956 and 1957, the swimming pools in my hometown were closed for large parts of the summer, just as pools all over America were closed, even though the vaccine was available, and the great mistake had been corrected. A dead virus makes a great vaccine, a live one does not. We are fortunate that Jenny McCarthy was nowhere to be seen at the time, she not having been born yet. It is she, you may recall, who a few years ago promulgated the nonsense that vaccines cause autism, she having gotten the spurious information from a quack doctor, later discredited. The great mistake was a product of corporate mismanagement and corruption, not bad science. But alas, science always eventually corrects, but capitalism and the free market does not. The 1918 flu pandemic resulted in the development of a flu vaccine, twenty two years after teh fact, in 1940. The fastest development of any vaccine ever was the one for mumps, which took four years.