Peter Salk remembers the jab his virologist father Dr Jonas Salk gave him with an experimental vaccine in 1953 that would stop the spread of the polio virus.
Like his famous father, Dr Peter Salk works in epidemiology. He tells Jesse Mulligan there is reason for hope in the race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, because of significant technological and scientific advances since the 1950s. The current crisis could be a catalyst for profound transition for humanity, he adds.
Peter Salk getting Polio vaccine from his Father Dr Jonas Salk Photo: Courtesy March of Dimes
Polio was a feared condition until 1955 when the Salk vaccine was introduced. Epidemics were increasingly devastating in post-war United States and other parts of the world. In 1952, 3145 died in the US and 21,269 were left with paralysis, most of these children.
“Frankly from him and my mother’s point of view, they just wanted to get us protected,” Salk says of his father’s actions.
Scientists were in a frantic race for a prevention or cure for the disease. Salk senior, who worked at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, undertook a project funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1948 to study the virus and find a cure. After seven years, a field trial was set up to test the Salk vaccine. Over 1.8 million schoolchildren took part.
The vaccine was hailed a success in April 1955 and Salk became a hero. An immediate rush to vaccinate began around the world using the new medicine. Salk himself campaigned for mandatory vaccination, claiming that public health should be considered a "moral commitment".
Later he spent years searching a vaccine against HIV, before his death in 1995.
“He was a student of humanity. He really cared about the human species and that moved more and more with time towards a direction of health for everyone,” Salk says.
The battle against Covid-19 is as serious as the fight against polio, its economic implications also being much more severe. Salk thinks the chances of getting a safe and effective Covid vaccine in circulation soon are high.
“There have been no vaccines against the coronavirus infections that have become used and so it’s still is somewhat unknown territory. The thing that is remarkable about what’s going on right now is back in the polio days there were really just two approaches to making vaccines – using a weakened live virus - and Elbert Sabin went on to develop one that was introduced - after the vaccine that my father and his research colleagues had been working on. And then the killed virus, with an un-activated virus approach.
“Now days there are variations on both of those themes… What one can do nowadays is take the genetic material from, say the coronavirus, and instead of injecting the weakened coronavirus, which could still have the danger of reverting back to dangerous form, you can take the genetic material from that virus and either inject in directly into people or animals, or change it into a different form of genetic material… or you can cut little snippets out of it and put them into another kind of virus that won’t be harmful…
“Inject that and that virus will grow and start churning out little pieces of the coronavirus, which will then affect the immune system and hopefully be able to produce a protective immune response.
“And on the other side of things, using a vaccine that’s so-called non-replicating, where it’s just inner material like a dead, killed or un-activated virus, you can now take the purified surface materials of the virus or the ones that are going to induce an immune response that will hopefully be protective and inject those in their pure form in one sort of variation or another."
He says there are dozens of teams from across the world working frantically to bring an effective product on to the market.
“There are just so many ways of going about it and so many people now doing that. There are at least 100 different experimental coronavirus vaccine programmes underway. There are eight or nine of those that are in the first stages of human trials.”
Salk agrees money interests may affect the distribution of a future vaccine, but he hopes an emphasis on human and social wellbeing over private profit will win through.
“There’s so much power in the pharmaceutical industry and science to do well, to make materials that will help in health and protection against disease. Of course, there a motive of profit… it all just needs to be kept in balance,” he says.
“I think everybody in the world is surprised at what happened, it’s not something we are used to. The polio situation had been going on for years and years.
"The difference between polio outbreaks and this current crisis is Covid-19 came out of the blue and created a unique situation - a historical moment, with humanity at a dangerous existential crossroads."
“This took us all by surprise. I’m constantly evaluating how I’m feeling about what has happened, from the first shock, then to feeling so proud of … what humanity has done in the face of such an extreme challenge to muster the will to take steps that have at least blunted the initial onslaught and now we’re in a phase where people have grown tired and where there’s all of the political complications of this data… But we absolutely cannot afford to let down our guard and pretend nothing has happened and if we aren’t careful it’s going to take a continued toll on everyone.”
He says his father would be watching the situation with an understanding that some of the kinds of turmoil being witnessed globally are “built into our species”.
“We’re at a point of transition, because if you look at the population curve over thousands of years the population was relatively flat for a long, long time and then over the last few hundred years all of the advances in technology and science and agriculture and so on, the population just shot up and that’s not something that can persist, as it goes beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth.
“And now we’re at a phase were the population growth is starting to slow down… Where humanity is right now is at a point of potential transition from that long phase where the emphasis was on growth to a new phase, which is sustainability and being able to co-operate with each other, not to be fighting each other."
He says the current political, economic and social chaos could be the birth pangs of a new society, with the Covid response playing a role bringing it forward.
“There’s a transitional moment that we’re in and this epidemic is hitting us right at that point. We have an opportunity to take advantage of it in many positive ways, but there’s a lot of tension right now between forces wanting to move things back to the good old ways of competition and self-orientation, as opposed to the forces that are moving in an evolutionary direction of ‘let’s get together and co-operate and make this world a place really good for everyone’.”
As well as concerns of vested interests holding back change as the political economy is pushed to adjust radically to meet human need, Salk also worries about “over-blown” reservations about vaccines among the general population.
“There’s been so much suspicion raised about vaccines,” he says. “Vaccines can have problems, there’s no question about that. Even the second polio vaccination that came along, with live virus, continues to cause polio because it’s not a stable weakened virus, it’s easy for the virus to revert back to its dangerous original form… But, if you do the work correctly, you monitor and take corrective measures when it’s necessary it’s possible to get to the right outcome.
“The contagious diseases that had plagued humanity for so long have really been brought under control to a great degree as a result of the success of vaccines.”
Polio has still not been eradicated, with wild strains of it still circulating in places in the developing world and some vaccines have actually caused outbreaks of the crippling illness.
In places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan there is cultural and religious resistance to it and that may be the case with Covid vaccines considered not fully safe or effective. Covid-19 has also complicated the last push to eradicate Polio, with vaccination teams unable to reach Covid-hit populations.
“It’s a complicated issue and I’d expect the polio effort to take a hit this year.”
