By TERRY ENGLAND
THE CUTTER INCIDENT: How
America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis
By Paul A. Offit
Yale University Press
238 pages, $27.50
You can blame hortages of flu vaccine on botched batches of polio vaccine in 1955. So says Paul Offit in The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis.
By the early 1950s the polio epidemic was in full swing and parents across the country were in a panic. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, founded in 1938 at the urging of President Franklin Roosevelt – a polio victim himself – was raising money by the bucketful to fund research.
One of the researchers was Jonas Salk, who was trying to develop a killed-virus vaccine, one that would inject a virus that has been killed by chemical means (formaldehyde) into a patient to stimulate a immune-system response.
Salk’s name came close to being reviled instead of honored. A large field trial of his vaccine had led the government to declare it safe. But in 1955, cases of immunized children coming down with polio started to show up. These cases came in children inoculated with vaccine from Cutter Laboratories in California. After some fumbling by government officials, the vaccine was pulled from the market.
Too late, because 220,000 people were infected by the virus in the Cutter vaccine; 70,000 developed muscle weakness, 164 were severely paralyzed and 10 died. Investigations pointed to the virus surviving the killing process because of faulty filtering methods.
Cutter was sued, of course; the first trial was Gottsdanker vs. Cutter Laboratories in 1958, brought by the parents of Anne Elizabeth Gottsdanker, who contracted polio through the vaccine.
“The jury had found that Cutter Laboratories was not negligent in the production of polio vaccine, but Cutter was still financially responsible (liable) for harm caused by its product,” Offit writes. “Liability without negligence (fault) was born.”
This has led drug companies to get out of the vaccine-production business.
“We sue pharmaceutical companies because we want them to pay for our health care and we want to punish them,” he writes.
The consequences could be dire, Offit warns. He quotes Anne Gottsdanker as saying she wishes the Cutters, owners of the lab where the contaminated vaccine was produced, could see her now – using crutches to walk, wearing a brace to protect a knee that is easily dislocated, suffering from being treated as a second-class citizen. Offit then says, partly because of the verdict of the Gottsdanker suit, Anne’s grandchildren could face diseases that could be stopped by vaccines but won’t be.
“Ironically, in an attempt to protect children from harm, we have inadvertently exposed them to a greater harm.”
Terry England
England is the Books page editor.
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