Even if the last stage of eradication is stubbornly slow, we have obviously been quite successful at limiting the number of cases.
The taliban started attacking polio vaccine workers and the UN suspended operations. Polio exists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria
According to a study conducted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, respondents misconceived the vaccine to be capable of causing harm to the immune system (93%), triggering adverse reactions 97.5%, to be against their social and moral values (95%), and to be not as good as traditional methods for treating children 98.5%
https://www.emro.who.int/emhj-volume-28-2022/volume-28-issue...
Is not a good rationale for making a decision. Parents, indeed anyone, shouldn't be worried about anything administered by a needle unless proper protocols are not followed, and they always should.
Nowadays it's a horrific notion and should never be done but back then the horrors of polio were so real and frightening that doing multiple vaccinations with one needle was of secondary importance (or so it seems). I've often wondered since how many cases of polio and hepatitis were actually spread back then by using a common needle (I've never understood why even back then doctors weren't concerned about this).
BTW, as I've mentioned previously, we kids were lined in the school's assembly hall in two long lines of over 100 that extended out the doors into the schoolyard—one line for boys and one for girls—and vaccinated immediately one after another. After every dozen or so kids the needle was changed.
It quickly got around that a new needle didn't hurt as much as a well-used one and we kids started jostling for positions in the line. We watched and counted how often the needle was changed then count our position in the line, we then we'd pay pennies to buy an optimal positions in the line (be first after the needle was changed). That being first was less risky never entered our minds.
At no time were we ever told about the dangers of sharing needles. As far as I am aware none of us got ill from that experience.
Incidentally, the whole school of about 1100 kids was vaccinated in about an hour and half—between the morning tea break and lunchtime. Compare that with the slow rigmarole of vaccination campaigns of today.
Which means someone at the CIA said, “Hey that thing that happened in the X-Files, let’s do that but for real!”
Spoiler:
It was the one where Mulder finds his sister’s record, then tears off the name to see his own underneath.
I doesn’t really matter though. The real world CIA vaccines were against Hepatitis B.
It also refers to the part in disc brakes which holds the brake pads and squeezes them together onto the rotor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk
Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.
Salk himself wasn't much in favour of a patent, stating that his techniques weren’t novel and the work was built upon the research of others.
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vacc...
The famous "could you patent the sun" quote was about obviousness, not about anything else.
I vividly recall my parents' mounting anxiety as three of our neighborhood kids were stricken and put in iron lungs. One died (age 4), two recovered (ages 5 & 6) after around 6 months in hospital. I've kept track of one - she's 74. In her 50s, she developed muscle degeneration as part of post-polio syndrome. Wrecked her ability to live independently.
I got both the Salk and the later Sabin vaccine. That took a huge weight from my parents' spirit, improved our family dynamics.
I'll track this story. I deeply hope for polio to follow smallpox into oblivion.
Dealing with vaccine-derived polio is going to be the big issue for the next decade, but projections suggest that type 1 polio will go out of control if OPV cessation happens on the desired timeline and the status quo is kept up until then.
If Ken Griffin or Jim Simons (or any hedge fund guy) wants some extra karma or has beef with Bill Gates, this is probably an $X billion project in total, but it seems to need someone who can out-asshole Afghan warlords and is willing to crack a few skulls to get it done.
Wasn't the gates foundation a big promoter of this? I thought it was one of their main focuses.
Gates himself moves between a lot of different "current things" - it was polio 15 years ago, then it became malaria, and now it seems to be the climate (with a brief stopover on COVID).