"Sorry--No Vaccine"

The great drive to get 58 million more Americans under the age of 40 vaccinated against polio before the 1957 epidemic season (TIME, March 18) was stalled in its tracks. The difficulty--familiar in the troubled history of polio vaccination since 1954 -- was the off -again, on-again supply of vaccine. Last year the vaccine was first scarce, then adequate, then overabundant; at year's end it was backing up in producers' pipelines. By a drastic failure of coordination between industry and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the manufacturers cut back production just when HEW, backed by President Eisenhower and the A.M.A., launched a campaign for mass vaccinations.

Eli Lilly & Co., which made two-thirds of all vaccine previously used, is only now getting all its virus pots cooking again. Other manufacturers are in similar plight. Surgeon General Leroy Burney of the U.S. Public Health Service suggested limiting shots to the under-20 age group, plus pregnant women, until the shortage eased. This would cut the number of unvaccinated eligibles to 23 million. But most city and county health departments could not meet even this goal: from Massachusetts to Illinois, Colorado and California, would-be vaccinees were all set to roll up their sleeves only to be told, "Sorry--no vaccine." Dozens of scheduled clinics were postponed, and hundreds more that had been planned were simply not scheduled.

Item: children and young adults in Texas should already have had at least two (better, three) shots by this week, when polio begins its annual epidemic advance northward from the Rio Grande. But in El Paso, one of the cities where polio normally breaks out earliest, the program was off indefinitely, and it was bogged down in Houston and Dallas.

Item: the Massachusetts department of public health had only 299,000 shots available; to finish giving full three-shot courses to all under 20, it would need 2,700,000.

At week's end. with only 3,220,000 doses in the nation's pipelines (against 26 million on Jan. 1), Dr. Burney decided on a year-round drive to flatten the peaks in vaccination activity, permit even-schedule production. He was hopeful that the supply crisis might end by mid-April. In the light of HEW's past misjudgments, Massachusetts officials did not expect it to end before Labor Day.

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