Jonas Salk announced a successful polio vaccine
On this day · 26 March 1953
In 1953, a researcher told the nation by radio that he had tested a vaccine against the disease parents feared most.
On the evening of March 26, 1953, virologist Jonas Salk went on CBS national radio and told American families that he had successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis — the virus behind the paralysis that filled hospital wards and iron lungs each summer.
The timing carried weight. 1952 had been the worst polio year on record in the United States: 58,000 new cases and more than 3,000 deaths, many of them children. Salk’s killed-virus vaccine, prepared in lab cultures, offered the first real promise of protection.
The announcement came two days before the work appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
This was a milestone, not yet a triumph. The famous nationwide field trial of nearly two million schoolchildren — the “Polio Pioneers” — would not return its verdict until 1955, when the vaccine was declared safe and effective. But the 1953 broadcast marked the moment the public first heard that the tide against a dreaded disease might finally be turning.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
