PhD Thesis - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

ecame known, resulted in 204 cases of paralytic polio and 11 deaths. 22 This debacle
in the United States demonstrated the lack of foresight shown by those responsible for
implementing the United States wide immunisation programme. Standards for
vaccine manufacture established in the trial had not been carried over to the mass
production of vaccine, and federal government safety tests were not as stringent.
Consequently batches of vaccine that passed the tests could, and did, contain live
poliovirus. An Oregon Senator, Wayne Morse, commented that, ‘The federal
government inspects meat in the slaughterhouses more carefully than it has inspected
the polio vaccine’. 23
As a result of these cases of vaccine-associated polio, Surgeon-General Leonard A.
Scheele firstly withdrew Cutter’s vaccine on 27 April 1955 and then in a ‘dramatic
television address’ halted the whole programme on 8 May, ‘pending a review of all
six manufacturers’. 24 American historian David Oshinsky has argued that in ‘some
ways, the Cutter Incident worked to strengthen the federal health bureaucracy’ with
improved and expanded testing and control of vaccines by the National Institute of
Health and the Laboratory of Biologics Control to ensure that a ‘Cutter’ could never
occur again. 25 With these changes in place the programme recommenced in July 1955
and by the end of the year approximately seven million American children had
received a first injection. 26
The Cutter Incident had major repercussions not just in America but also around the
world. Indeed, for many countries, including New Zealand, it changed the face of
their planned immunisation programmes. The United States was in many ways less
affected by the fall-out from Cutter than countries overseas as its programme was able
to continue, albeit rather late. One of the most important consequences was that it
affected confidence regarding safety, with other companies fearing they might not be
able to produce inactivated vaccine. In Britain the Medical Research Council (MRC)
suspended trials with the original Salk vaccine to wait for the results of Salk vaccine
22
T. Gould, A Summer Plague. Polio and its Survivors. New Haven, 1995, p.153.
23
P. A. Offit, The Cutter Incident. p.118. For a detailed analysis of what went wrong at Cutter see
Chapter 6, pp.106-31.
24 th
D. M. Oshinsky, Polio. An American Story. The Crusade that Mobilized the Nation Against the 20
Century’s Most Feared Disease, New York, 2005, p.226.
25 ibid., p.238.
26 J. R. Wilson, Margin of Safety. The fight against polio, London, 1963, p.118.
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