The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis PDF

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Vaccines have saved more lives than any other single medical advance. Yet today only four companies make vaccines, and there is a growing crisis in vaccine availability. Why has this happened? This remarkable book recounts for the first time a devastating episode in 1955 at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, thathas led many pharmaceutical companies to abandon vaccine manufacture.

Drawing on interviews with public health officials, pharmaceutical company executives, attorneys, Cutter employees, and victims of the vaccine, as well as on previously unavailable archives, Dr. Paul Offit offers a full account of the Cutter disaster. He describes the nation’s relief when the polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk in 1955, the production of the vaccine at industrial facilities such as the one operated by Cutter, and the tragedy that occurred when 200,000 people were inadvertently injected with live virulent polio virus: 70,000 became ill, 200 were permanently paralyzed, and 10 died. Dr. Offit also explores how, as a consequence of the tragedy, one jury’s verdict set in motion events that eventually suppressed the production of vaccines already licensed and deterred the development of new vaccines that hold the promise of preventing other fatal diseases.

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• File Size: 3088 KB
• Print Length: 256 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (October 10, 2005)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0015GUT5E
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #385,768 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #35 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Specialties > Preventive Medicine
• #35 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Specialties > Preventive Medicine

The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis PDF

There's a lot of noise about vaccines today, what with bird flu and who knows what over the horizon, but nothing compared with 50 years ago, when the Salk polio vaccine was introduced.

People younger than about 60 years old can hardly imagine the fear that gripped American parents every summer then. The shadow of the iron lung was far more terrifying than the shadow of the atomic bomb.

Salk vaccine worked and, under proper controls, was safe.

But controls were not proper, and vaccine made by Cutter Laboratories killed 10 people and paralyzed a few hundred more. At least several hundred thousand Americans were exposed to live polio virus. More did not become severely ill because fewer than one percent of people exposed to wild virus show symptoms.

Physician Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher and pediatrician in Philadelphia, says the "Cutter Incident" was more than just a forgotten medical mishap.

The net Offit casts brings back an amazing variety of things: research on aborted fetuses, Eddie Cantor and Nancy Reagan, Nobel Prizes and presidential politics, irresponsible journalists, backstabbing researchers.

Offit, a skilled expository writer, packs a lot of information into the first 130 pages to set up his current concern: That the fallout from Cutter Laboratories' bad vaccine led to legal precedents that continue to endanger lives today.

In other words, Offit has reached back half a century to find a hook on which to hang a plea for tort "reform."

Tort reform is a swamp with only a narrow causeway through it.

On the left hand lie the plaintiffs' lawyers, greedy, sensationalist and underhanded, as exemplified by the Milli Vanilli raid.