Angela Matysiak writes for TechnologyReview.com, “April 12 was the day, 50 years ago, that the U.S. Public Health Service licensed the killed-virus vaccine against poliomyelitis developed by Jonas Salk. In the decades since, a great myth has grown to dominate the popular imagination. Its name is “The Conquest of Polio,” and Salk is its hero.

On the anniversary day and minute, the Smithsonian Institution tolled the bell on its oldest building 50 times to open an exhibit at the National Museum of American History centered on Salk and the vaccine. That morning, the science correspondent for National Public Radio extolled the polio conquest and the Salk vaccine in the first part of a three-part series. Publications marked the occasion–the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Smithsonian magazine, and a dozen others. In the weeks before, two new books had appeared. Six more are now in the works.

This retelling of the history of polio, however, is largely a distortion. The full, true story is far more complex. Its hero is Albert Sabin–for if any one man conquered polio, it was Sabin, who developed the oral attenuated live-virus vaccine. While Salk’s vaccine did slow down the incidence of polio among middle-class Americans, its cost and its requirement of three injections and a booster meant that for years the disease continued to affect the poor and others lacking access to proper medical care. It was only after Sabin’s oral vaccine, which was cheap, effective, and easy to administer, was licensed for production in 1962 that polio could be fully controlled in the United States.”

[Continue reading The Myth of Jonas Salk]