Jeffrey Kluger - Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio

April 1954

All the talk about the little white coffins seemed to start out of nowhere, but when it did, the word spread fast. Tens of thousands of them were out there, it was said, stashed in depots around the country. The location of the depots was never specified, and that was just as well. If you knew where the caches of coffins were kept, youd know where the government expected the people to start dying. All of those people would be children, of course. Thats why the coffins were littleand white.

Jonas Salk, it was said, would be the person responsible for the deaths. It was Salk who had cultured up the virus that would be injected into the boys and girls. Salk himself was certain this version of the preparation would not do anyone any harm. The virus he was using was dead, after allhe had killed it himself.

Months before, Salk and his colleagues had tried his formula out on monkeys, and the results had been good. Only then had he injected himself and his lab workers, not to mention his wife and his three young sonsthe oldest of the boys barely ten, the youngest barely four. And only after inoculating all of them had he similarly treated the 7,500 children whose parents had willingly, indeed desperately, offered them up. In just a few more weeks, 400,000 other children around the country would be lining up to receive Salks injections too. It was perhaps the greatest experiment of its kind ever attempted by medical science.

Salk tried not to be troubled by the coffin story as it got around, but it wasnt easy. It wasnt his injections that were dangerous, after all, it was a wild virusa virus that had killed uncounted children for generations and had been attacking with a special savageness in the past few years.

In the summer of 1952 alone, more than 55,000 children in the United States had gone to bed with what their mothers believed was a cold and had woken up feverish, chilled, and rubber-limbed the next day. When the worried-looking doctor was led into the childrens rooms, where they lay flat on their clammy backs beneath their wilted sheets, hed ask them almost casually if they wouldnt mind lifting up their heads to look at their belly buttons. When they couldnt, it was as sure a sign as any that the cold was actually poliomyelitis and that the queerly rubbery limbs would soon grow much worse. The following summer, over 35,000 more children went to bed sick and failed the belly-button test and were hurried off to hospitals, where they waited to learn if the virus would quit when it had claimed their legs, or if it would go after their arms and their torsos and their very breath as well.

Now it was April 1954, and the fast-warming spring weather was as sure a reminder as any that the polio season was again approaching, following the heat from south to north, picking off children as it went like shot hitting skeet. It was against that onrushing danger that Salk had been racingand it was against that same danger that all the whispering about the coffins got started. It was whispering that was begun, not surprisingly, by Walter Winchell.

During the Second World War, Winchell had been one of the glitteriest if most rough-cut stones in Hollywoods jewel box of celebrity reporters. In recent years, however, the appeal of his carnival-barker reporting had faded, and while plenty of newspapers still carried his column, his true soapbox was now radio, where hed shout out his stories in a fifteen-minute slot every Sunday night. The show wasnt quite the backwater his critics liked to say it was, but it was clearly a banishment to the provinces compared with the vast stage he had once commanded.

For a man not often received in polite journalistic company, Winchell did do his homework. He made it a habit to keep his ear to the ground, listening not just for big stories but also for the emotional details that gave them their headline-making power. Winchell knew that Salks vaccine, like any new vaccine, made a lot of people nervous, because a vaccine made sloppily or improperly could give you the very illness you were trying to avoid. This was why Winchells words at the beginning of his April 4 broadcast carried such force.

Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, he began, the familiar introduction by now grown tired. Attention everyone. In a few moments I will report on a new polio vaccineit may be a killer.

Fifteen seconds elapsed while Winchells director played a commercial message, and then the newsman was back on the air.