Polio Tempest

The American Medical Association has consistently backed Salk vaccine as the most effective means of preventing paralytic poliomyelitis. Last week in seeming contradiction, the A.M.A. Journal printed a judgment that "much of the Salk vaccine used in the U.S. has been worthless" -- a charge that could snarl plans to get millions of Americans inoculated before polio begins its 1961 northward march with advancing summer. The Scripps-Howard newspapers headlined the statement, and Congressman Kenneth Roberts of Alabama urged an investigation.

The Journal's seeming switch came on its "Questions and Answers" page, where it printed an inquiry from an anonymous Wisconsin doctor asking about the value of Salk shots. To provide an expert answer, the Journal selected Dr. Herbert Ratner, health commissioner of Oak Park, Ill., who has been attacking the Salk vaccine ever since it was released in 1955. Ratner wrote that it is "generally recognized" that Salk vaccine is ineffective, because it is "an unstandardized product of an unstandardized process."

The facts are that some Salk shots have been worthless because the vaccine lost its potency with age, or because manufacturers, determined to make it safe, overdid the job of inactivating the virus. Despite this, overall effectiveness of Salk vaccine in preventing paralytic polio has ranged statistically from 75% to 90%. As Dr. Jonas E. Salk retorted: "The continued occurrence of polio is not due primarily to failure of the vaccine, but to failure to use it." But most authorities admit that for fuller protection, the U.S. needs a more potent vaccine, probably the Sabin oral type, which should be available within a year.

The head of the National Foundation, Basil O'Connor, blasted the Journal's publication of Dr. Ratner's judgment as "a great disservice to the public." The A.M.A. sputtered that it had printed only "the correspondent's opinion and not the opinion of the A.M.A."

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