News Stories

A brief topic on an issue that has been urgent in the past and to this day remains relevant: vaccination, in this case the anti-polio vaccine.

Poliomyelitis made many victims in the early 20th century, particularly children left with motor disabilities in the days before the development of the first anti-polio vaccine (inactive polio virus) by Jonas Salk. The vaccine, administered via injection, was first used internationally in 1955 and was introduced into Romania’s national vaccination schedule in 1956. A few years later, another American researcher, Albert Sabin, developed the oral polio vaccine (live attenuated virus), which became available in 1961. In Romania, as in many other countries, it was supported by public awareness campaigns such as this short newsreel segment.

Perhaps less well known is that the vaccine developed by Sabin in the U.S. was first tested in the Soviet Union. At the time, the U.S. was grappling with significant public anxiety following a serious incident involving a batch of anti-polio vaccines, which led the U.S. government to reject testing the vaccine on its population—despite the fact that Sabin himself tested it on his own family. Meanwhile, the USSR was willing to proceed with the trials and conducted successful tests between 1959 and 1961, vaccinating around 77 million people, primarily children. In 1961, the vaccine was also introduced in Romania, where it was used effectively until 2008. The clip featured here is from 1961, shortly after the anti-polio pill was rolled out in Romania.

We should also add that the two researchers, Salk and Sabin, refused to patent their vaccines in order to allow the price to remain low. The fact that American children received the anti-polio vaccine on a sugar cube so that they can swallow it more easily, inspired the piece composed by the brothers Robert and Richard Sherman for the musical Mary Poppins, about how “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”.