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Early results of the Covid-19 vaccine trials sponsored by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca
are welcome news, observes Diane E. Meier, professor, Sean Morrison, professor and chair of the department of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and Chris Barker, statistician and former student of Paul Meier.
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| Bottles containing the polio vaccine in April 1959. M. McKeown/Express/Getty Images |
We appreciate the urgency of getting these newly developed coronavirus vaccines out to millions of Americans and potentially billions of people around the world.
We also know all too well the tragic story of a rushed polio vaccine.
We know this story because of our personal connections with Paul Meier, a young statistician at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s who studied the polio vaccine program of 1955 and its aftermath. He was the father of one of the authors (D.E.M.), father-in-law of another (R.S.M.), and mentor of another (C.B.).
The missteps that resulted in 40,000 unnecessary vaccine-induced polio infections are being repeated today...
Paul Meier knew the consequences of bad science and failed oversight. He also knew that when science is done correctly, the outcomes can be transformative. Polio vaccine research and production reopened with the much stronger safety regulations and scientific oversight that he had advocated for. When Diane was old enough for her vaccine, her father walked her to school to get one of the first doses of the recently released Sabin “live” oral polio vaccine. They stood in line in the school cafeteria for her vaccine sugar cube, a daughter trusting her father, her father trusting in science.
Polio is a thing of the past.
Source: STAT
