During 1952 and 1953, the U.S. experienced an outbreak of roughly ninety-five thousand polio cases, with a death count of over forty-six hundred. Millions of dollars were invested in finding a vaccine.

The first effective polio vaccine was developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk and a team at the University of Pittsburgh. On March 26th, 1953 Salk went on CBS radio to report the first round of successful tests. Beginning on February 23rd, 1954, the vaccine was tested at Arsenal Elementary School and the Watson Home for Children in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jonas Edward Salk was born October 28, 1914 in New York City, the eldest son to Russian-Jewish immigrants. He earned a medical degree from the NYU School of Medicine in 1939 and became a doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital.

In 1942, Salk went to the University of Michigan to develop a Flu vaccine. He soon became assistant professor of epidemiology. Five years later he was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. His main mission: develop a polio vaccine.

Salk believed his vaccine, composed of “killed” polio virus, could immunize without risk of infecting the patient. Salk gave the vaccine to volunteers who had not had polio. All developed polio antibodies and experienced no reaction to the vaccine.

In 1954, national testing began on one million children. But, in April 1955, soon after mass vaccination began in the US, some patients contracted the disease after being vaccinated. These vaccines were manufactured by the Cutter Pharmaceutical Company. In response, the Surgeon General yanked all polio vaccines made by Cutter Laboratories from the market.

Soon, the Wyeth polio vaccine was also reported to have paralyzed and killed several children. It was discovered that some vaccines made by Cutter and Wyeth had not been properly inactivated, allowing live poliovirus into more than 100,000 doses.

The next month, the National Institutes of Health and Public Health Services established a Technical Committee to review all polio vaccine lots. The problem was quickly remedied.

In the two years before the vaccine the average number of polio cases in the U.S. was more than forty-five thousand. By 1962, that number had dropped to nine-hundred ten. Jonas Salk purposely never patented the vaccine or earned any money from his discovery.