Polio is a disease that has been conquered by conventional
medicine.
Or so the Conventional Medical Establishment (CME) claims; and such has
been the propaganda success of this claim, most people now believe it was the polio vaccines that achieved this outstanding success.
This is the third in a series of blogs on the theme "The Myths of Conquering Disease". The polio vaccines, alongside the smallpox and measles vaccines, lay at the heart of the widespread faith most people have in vaccines. What becomes clear, when the history of polio vaccines are concerned, is that their role overcoming polio is equally misplaced. Much of the information I will use here is taken from Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History: Suzanne Humphries & Roman Bystrianyk. ISBN 1480216895. The authors provide a comprehensive view of the history of polio vaccinations, and their failure.
Poliomyelitis is a description of spinal pathology, the inflammation of the brainstem and spinal cord. It is not an old disease. Humphries and Bystrianyk (H&B) provides a graph outlining in incidence in the USA between 1912 and 1970; and asks whether a disease that became known as‘the great, or the vicious crippler' came to be known as such an infamous monster.
"Naturally existing poliovirus was a common bowel inhabitant for millennia, always there, continuously circulating through humans, but never causing paralysis under later when something changed".
H&B ask the question about what changed, what opportunities arose to afford poliovirus the ability to cause epidemics from the early 20th century, and why paralytic poliomyelitis become an epidemic disease only in the 1940's and 1950's. They conclude that the factors contributing to the polio epidemics were:
- refined sugar, white flour,
- alcohol and tobacco,
- tonsillectomies,
- vaccines,
- antibiotics, DDT,
- and arsenic.
"Many thousands of people were needlessly paralyzed because the medical system refused to look at the consequence of these.... and concentrated solely on vaccine research".
H&B also state that polio, as diagnosed in the 1950's, was a number of distinct diseases, including enteroviruses, undiagnosed congenital syphilis, arsenic and DDT toxicity, transverse myelitis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, and lead poisoning. Specific polio diagnosis was not pursued with laboratory testing before 1958, and that before the first vaccine was deployed, diagnosis of polio was "very loose". But this soon changed - after the introduction of the vaccine.
"The practice among doctors before 1954 was to diagnose all patients who experienced even short-term paralysis (24 hours) with 'polio'. In 1955, the year the Salk vaccine was released, the diagnostic criteria became much more stringent. If there was no residual paralysis 60 days after onset, the disease was not considered to be paralytic polio".
So one simple change in diagnostic criteria brought about a major reduction in the number of paralytic cases in 1955-1957 "whether or not any vaccine was used". Such are the wonders of medical science, and the manipulation of medical statistics!
Moreover, after the vaccine, "there was a concerted effort to distinguish cases with poliovirus from cases without it", thereby, in another stroke, removing cases of transverse myelitis, viral or aseptic meningitis, Guillain- Barre, and many others. Suddenly, there wasn't as much polio around now! What a wonderful thing the vaccine was!
Polio was by this time considered to be a dreadful disease, with images of polio victims "locked into our collective memory" in iron lung machines. There were very few such cases, but this was what polio beacme to mean to most people.
There were other images of polio which were the result of other conventional medical treatments that were used prior to the vaccines.
"We'd take the children to the operating room in those days, straighten them out under anaesthetic, and put them in plaster casts. When they wake up, they screamed. The next day they still cried from the pain. That was the accepted and universal treatment virtually all over the world".
Little wonder, then, that most people were pleased to see the vaccine, and were prepared to welcome it as a brilliant new treatment.
The problem was, however, that poliomyelitis was not a virus!
The disease never acted like a virus. It occurred mainly in summer (most viruses are most most active during the winter), and affected mainly middle-class and wealthy children (most effect children from poorer families). Unusually the poor seemed to be largely immune to polio. It occurred in local clusters, in certain schools or towns. Nor was the infectiousness of Polio ever demonstrated.
However Louis Pasteur's ‘germ theory’ was in vogue in the 1940's and 1950's, so the CME searched for a virus to blame for the epidemic, even an innocent one, to the virtual exclusion of all other causes and explanations. And this was so even when there was clear evidence that polio was not a viral disease.
So the conventional medical approach, from the very beginning, was heading in the wrong direction. As usually, the motivation was the pursuit of profit. Potentially there were enormous financial gains for anyone who could isolate the virus, and produce a vaccine. So the voices that questioned this dominant narrative, doctors like Ralph Scobey and Morton Biskind, were ignored.
The research done by Scobey and Biskind was published in medical journals, and presented to the USA Congress in 1951 and 1952. It detailed the evidence that Polio, the ‘summer plague’, was the result of poisoning, and linked polio outbreaks to children who had played downstream from cotton mills, and fields sprayed with chemicals, or exposed in some way to eating chemically-sprayed orchard fruit.
"The main chemical offenders of the time were mercury, lead, arsenic, cyanide and phosphorous which had been demonstrably linked to various degrees of paralysis as well as death in workers and artisans throughout Europe who had been exposed to these chemicals during the progressive industrialisation of these areas. In addition, further afield in Australia, a ‘polio epidemic’ was linked to the widespread use of a phosphorous-containing fertilizer."
But this evidence was ignored. The search for a virus, and for a vaccine to destroy it, continued unabated. Any other cause of polio was dismissed. So the epidemics continued, and worsened. Then another culprit was discovered.
"(DDT) was thought to be a safe and effective insecticide - even safe enough to spray at public beaches and directly onto children in an effort to halt the spread of polio".
Eventually, DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) was implicated. DDT is now infamous, but at this time it was being heavily promoted by the manufacturer, Monsanto. It was routinely sprayed on crops, animals, even on adults (for example, soldiers) and children. It was considered to be entirely safe.
"They sprayed towns, crops and orchards with deadly poison DDT insecticide,
suggesting that polio might be caused by flies. The chemical companies
reaped the benefits but the orchards were seriously damaged, crops were ruined and people
were killed by this wild and unwarranted experiment."
So the polio epidemic escalated. Research soon demonstrated the link between DDT and polio, but the race for a vaccines had already started, and could not be diverted.
(PS The link between Polio, and pesticides like DDT, and its predecessors, was further examined in this article by Roman Bystriniac in 2025).
THE VACCINES
According to the CME, the paralysis from polio was caused by a common stomach virus that had lived in our stomachs for millennia. The vaccine race was ultimately won by Jonas Salk. 17,000 monkeys were herded out of the jungles of India, Africa and Asia, and shipped to the USA to take part in Salk’s vaccine experiments. By 1955 his polio vaccine (which contained the poison formaldehyde, used to 'attenuate' the virus, and several other toxic chemicals) was released to a public already in fear of polio, and so willing to accept anything that might be a 'solution' to the disease.
What was discovered later was that the formaldehyde was not only a poison, but was unsuccessful in 'attenuating' the polio virus. Salk had been warned - but he did not heed the warnings. His vaccine also contained Merthiolate, a mercury-based compound, that supposedly had a virus-killing effect. So the vaccine was a cocktail of poisons - and all of them were to be injected into the bloodstream
The Salk vaccine was an unmitigated disaster. After it was introduced, polio rates rocketed, particularly in those US states that had the highest vaccination rates. The following states are examples of their polio cases before and after the vaccine.
- Massachusetts: from 273 to 2,027,
- Wisconsin: from 326 to 1655,
- New York state: from 469 to 764.
This fiasco became known as "the Cutter Incident", after the vaccine manufacturer, Cutter Laboratories. Within days of vaccination 40,000 children had contracted polio, 200 with severe paralysis, as well as 10 deaths. Even Paul Offit has admitted that at least 220,000 people were infected with live polio virus contained in Cutter vaccine; he said that 70,000 developed muscle weakness, 164 were severely paralyzed, and 10 people were killed.
A detailed description of this incident can be found in Eleanor McBean's book, ‘The Poisonous Needle’. This was an almost contemporaneous account of the incident, written in 1957 - an amazing document. She talks of the doubts amongst doctors about the efficacy of the Salk vaccine, for several reasons:
- English Authorities in July, 1955, cancelled the Salk vaccine
programs as too dangerous.
- All European countries, with the exception of Denmark,
have discontinued their programs. Even Denmark is reported to have found
live virus in the Salk Vaccine.
- Canada decided, as of July 29, 1955, to postpone its vaccination
program until the early part of 1956, to take advantage of the expected advances in the
development of safe and effective poliomyelitis vaccine.
- Two Nobel Prize winners, Dr. John Enders and Dr. Wendell M.
Stanley, both have publicly indicated their uncertainties about the Salk vaccine.
- The Polio Advisory Committee and health officials of at least one
state, Massachusetts, have advised against public inoculations and have withheld approval
of the use of the vaccine until at least Jan. 1, 1956.
- One of the two major pharmaceutical houses connected with the
production of Salk Vaccine since the 1954 field trials has recently found it
necessary to withdraw their product from the market’."
The Cutter Incident resulted in massive public concern. Although initially dismissed as ‘a bad batch’, trust in the vaccine never recovered. As McBean wrote:
"Many doctors, and public authorities as well as individual laymen are not only
questioning the safety of the Salk vaccine but are denouncing it. Even the Journal of
the American Medical Association in a recent (1956) "Report on Rate of Use of
Poliomyelitis Vaccine" expresses concern about the dropping off of sales of this
product in the "announcement by the Public Health Service that states are not using
their vaccine supplies at the rate the serum is being released."
Only about 45% of the 7,000,000 doses available had been used. And although the vaccination programme continued until 1963 it was on a much smaller scale. Public trust never recovered. The Salk vaccine was certainly not a vaccine that conquered polio.
But the Salk vaccine did cause unprecedented harm. It has been estimated that as many as 100 million people were injected with this 'contaminated' vaccine. One doctor is quoted saying that vaccination in the USA caused as many cases of poliomyelitis as it prevented in 1955, bad enough, but the situation was far worse than this. The following is a brief outline of some of the adverse effects caused by the SV40 vaccine, in America alone:
- 38% of bone cancers were identified with SV40 (Loyola university Medical Center),
- 58% of mesotheliomas (lung cancer) had SV40, Osteosarcomas (a type of bone cancer) – 10 times higher in states where the contaminated vaccine was used,
- Cancer Research identified SV40 in 23% blood samples and 45% semen samples confirming that SV40 could be sexually transmitted,
- The
New England Journal of Medicine published two studies demonstrating
that SV40 could be passed onto infants from vaccinated mothers and those
children had a 13 times greater incidence of brain tumours.
Fortunately for the CME other things happened to save its reputation. The change in polio diagnosis helped, of course. There was an apparent reduction in cases. But the realisation that DDT was unsafe grew, and it was phased out in the USA, Canada, and elsewhere in the 1960's. In addition, H&B outlined how several other contributory factors to the polio
epidemic were tackled at the same time, including the reduction in the use of tonsilectomy, the
use of arsenic, including its use in some pharmaceutical drugs (for example, neorsphenamine and neosalvarsan).
The Salk vaccine was a tragic failure,
but it was a tragedy
successfully covered up by the dishonesty of pharmaceutical propaganda. The public
were lied
to, misinformed to the extent that most people continue to believe that it was the vaccine that conquered polio. Today, few people know about about the Cutter disaster. So the CME, as it has done so often (for instance, with measles and smallpox), not only rescued the reputation of vaccines, but eventually had the audacity to claim credit for the reduction in polio cases.
As H&B even discovered why the public were not information about the failure of the Salk vaccine, quoting a Congressman, Percy Priest, who said this in 1956.
"If word ever got out that the Public Health Service had actually done something damaging to the health of the American people, the consequences would be terrible ..... We felt that no lasting good could come to science or the public if the Public Health Services were discredited".
As H&B commented: "So much for evidence-based medicine and scientific truth"!
The story has continued, polio has not been conquered. In places where DDT was not banned, for example, in some states of India, polio continued to be, and still is, an endemic disease. In 1995, an immunisation programme called Pulse Polio was established, with the aim of eradicating polio by 2005. It would appear that the CME still believed its own propaganda about the effectiveness of vaccines. The goal was not achieved, and has still not been achieved.
"A major oversight on the part of the press and the medical establishment .... is that massive "Pulse' vaccination campaigns have done nothing to eliminate childhood paralysis, and, in fact, there is strong evidence pointing to the likelihood that experimental polio vaccination is related to the sharp rise in AFP (Acute Flacid Paralysis). It has been reported in the Lancet that the incidence of AFP, especially non-polio AFP, increased drastically in India after an experimental, high potency polio vaccine was introduced. Worse still is that children identified with non-polio AFP are more than twice the risk of dying than those with wild polio infection."
So what does the CME do in response to this rise in AFP resulting from a vaccine campaign. They increase the vaccination programme! They claim that India is now been free of paralysis from 'wild polio virus. No cases since 2010, they tell us. But
they don't tell us about the rise of AFP, caused by the polio
vaccines. As H&B ask, "Isn't
vaccination really about eliminating paralysis ... or is it simply to
replace wild virus with a vaccine virus regardless of outcome."
At least H&B re now reporting that there was "a new resistance coming from the 'educated middle class people" and that "one family claimed that their five year old child had received pulse polio vaccination 32 times".
And so it continues. More and more vaccines, and so-called philanthropists pouring endless amounts of money into vaccination programmes that do not work, and which cause an equally deadly condition. It's not polio, we are told, it is AFP. Conquering polio by changing the name!
There has been little or no effort to find why the vaccines don't work, why they cause problems, and whether there might be a better strategy - reducing the impact of chemicals, like DDT, arsenic; improved nutrition, clean, chemical free water, "and the luxury of being free from war, famine, and spiritual persecution".
So
the idea that "polio was conquered by vaccines" is a fairy tale, a fig-leaf that has been brilliantly
constructed by the CME, and cleverly sold to the public. The vaccines were a triumph that
never happened. The CME has persuaded us that the vaccines as the saviour, they had
vanquished polio, and this claim continues serving as a prime example
of 'vaccine success' 60 years later!
Everyone should now start asking some key question. The ultimate question is why the CME want to claim that conquering polio (plus measles and smallpox) with vaccines has been one of their greatest achievements? If they had a real achievement to tell us about they would surely be telling us about it - rather than focusing on these three fairy tales!
The reason for this is simple. Apart from the mythical achievements of an ineffective, often lethal vaccine legacy, conventional medicine has little else to brag about. It has failed to achieve anything more effective or more successful. It is a failed medical system!
