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By Dennis Thompson Health Day Reporter
(Health day)
TUESDAY, November 2, 2021 (HealthDay News) – An infection that can deactivate and kill lurks lurking in the dirt, but a brand new vaccine offers hope that almost everyone, including children, can escape it. After scientific tests, a national deployment of the vaccine begins.
As the U.S. government prepares to offer COVID-19 vaccines to approximately 28 million children aged 5 to 11, high levels of vaccine reluctance in some corners can make the campaign hard to sell.
But this isn’t the first time that a national effort has sought to protect American children from a serious infectious health threat, and the story offers successful instructions for use.
By the mid-1950s, polio was rampant in the United States every summer, with random outbreaks occurring in one or the next communities.
The killed virus polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk was considered a godsend, and in 1954 frantic parents proposed more than 1.8 million children to serve as test subjects in a field trial of one year on the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Of these children, 600,000 would be randomly injected with three doses of the experimental polio vaccine or a placebo.
The picture stands in stark contrast to today, with large numbers of parents hesitant to vaccinate themselves or their children with COVID-19 vaccines that have been safely administered to more than 221 million people in the states. United and nearly 3.9 billion worldwide.
“It is a really sad thing that we have achieved in this society, that people have come to this level of distrust of government and the medical field in general,” said Dr Peter Salk, son of Jonas Salk and President of Jonas Salk. Heritage Foundation.
Today’s COVID-19 vaccines have been developed at a breakneck pace, with drug companies providing billions of dollars in government funding, using cutting-edge technology to make the jabs, and then testing them in streamlined clinical trials.
The United States Food and Drug Administration last week approved a reduced dose COVID vaccine for children aged 5 to 11 based on a clinical trial involving about 4,700 children. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to consider the pediatric COVID vaccine this week.
“Thanks to advances in modern science and technology, we are able to access some of these solutions much faster,” said Stacey Stewart, President and CEO of March of Dimes. “Clinical trials are done very differently today and always bring us to the same place, able to validate the safety and efficacy of vaccines.”
In contrast, polio had been a perennial and petrifying threat for decades as Jonas Salk prepared his vaccine for large-scale testing.
“These epidemics had been going on for years and people were terrified,” her son said. “There was no way of knowing when an epidemic was going to strike near you, if it was going to strike your child or someone else’s child.”
There was “total fear,” said Peter Salk.
“And when children were infected, they could be crippled for life,” he said. “They could end up in a steel lung for a short time until their respiratory muscles recover or for the rest of their lives, or they could die.”
Once the Salk vaccine was found to be safe in the first trials involving 5,320 people – including Salk himself, his wife and his three sons – the drums began to beat loudly for a massive clinical trial to test its effectiveness. .
The National Foundation for Childhood Paralysis – a precursor to the March of Dimes – spent $ 7.5 million in private donations to start, organize and run the vaccine trial, with little involvement from the federal government. That’s over $ 76 million in today’s dollars.
There was tremendous pressure to have the trial done as quickly as possible, before the next polio season.
Between April 26 and July 10, 1954, volunteers distributed Salk’s set of three polio vaccines. In total, more than 443,000 children have received at least one polio vaccination, while more than 210,000 have received a placebo, according to the March of Dimes.
Researchers spent the remainder of 1954 following all the children and taking blood samples from over 40,000 to examine their antibody response.
‘The vaccine works’ – and the celebrities spread the word
The National Foundation issued a press release on April 12, 1955: “The vaccine works. It is safe, effective and powerful. Clinical trials have found it to be 80-90% effective in preventing polio.
The New York Times broke the news with a headline:
“SALK’S POLIOTIC VACCINE IS SUCCESSFUL; MILLIONS WILL SOON BE VACCINATED; THE CITY SCHOOLS START THE DRAWINGS ON APRIL 25. “
Headlines will also follow any final CDC decision to make pediatric COVID vaccines available for children aged 5 to 11. It will be impossible to achieve any type of herd immunity without their vaccination. And children tend to spread all kinds of germs, endangering the health of their older parents.
But times have changed so much that Salk and Stewart are wondering how far the pediatric COVID vaccine will be adopted, compared to the polio vaccine.
“When the polio vaccine was announced, the whole country erupted in relief and excitement, but March of Dimes still had to do a lot of work to make sure everyone could get the vaccine because it was something new and something that everyone had to feel comfortable with, ”said Stewart.
Celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Sammy Davis Jr., Bob Hope, Lucille Ball and Joe DiMaggio have endorsed the vaccine.
“Elvis Presley was on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ and authorized a New York state official to vaccinate him on the show,” said Stewart. “You can imagine the powerful impact it had. ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ was one of the most popular TV shows at the time, and everyone knew Elvis Presley.”
The pediatric COVID-19 vaccine will have a much less celebrity rollout, at least as the White House imagines.
The Biden administration avoided mass immunizations for children, instead setting up a system whereby vaccines would be administered under familiar conditions. by people parents know and trust.
More than 25,000 pediatric and family doctor clinics will provide injections to children, along with tens of thousands of pharmacies, children’s hospitals and community health centers, according to the White House plan.
There is much less trust in government and medical expertise these days, said Stewart and Salk, fueled in part by lies and rumors spread across the internet and social media.
“We saw the power of a lot of misinformation and how it affected people’s acceptance of the vaccine and their confidence in the vaccine,” said Stewart.
Reluctance to immunize dates back centuries
Still, parents’ reluctance to get vaccinated is not new, Salk said.
“Opposition to vaccines goes back hundreds of years, with the smallpox vaccine,” the first form of which was discovered in 1796, said Salk. “People were making cartoons about the horrible side effects that would come from injecting the smallpox virus and so on.”
But in today’s climate, some parents are likely to need to hear from an expert they know personally to be swayed in favor of the COVID vaccine for their children.
“For many parents, it will really be a matter of many pediatricians talking to families individually and making sure the vaccine is safe for their children,” said Stewart. “Obviously, parents trust their pediatricians on a whole host of issues related to their children’s health. In the end, it will be less of a major spokesperson or the President of the United States. . It will likely come down to tens of thousands of pediatricians across the country to give parents the reassurance they need and reassurance that the vaccine is safe for their children. “
The pediatric COVID vaccine is also being introduced at a time when decades of anti-vaccine sentiment has formed in the United States, Salk said.
“People still carry these fears and want to prevent their children from being routinely immunized against measles and pertussis, etc., and the children themselves pay the price,” he said. “The public is also paying the price, because it means that diseases like measles cannot be eliminated in this country. “
Groups like the March of Dimes will need to step in and fight anti-vaccine propaganda, to help promote COVID vaccines for children, Stewart said.
“I think there needs to be a bit of effort to make sure that we are fighting back and combating misinformation while ensuring that the voices entrusted to deliver the most accurate information to people,” she said. . “We need to have a holistic approach when it comes to continuing to tackle vaccine reluctance and ensuring that the right information from trusted experts starts to cover up the misinformation that exists.”
SOURCES: Peter Salk, MD, director and president, Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation, La Jolla, California; Stacey Stewart, MBA, President and CEO, March of Dimes, Arlington, Va.
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