What Polio Vaccine Injury Looks Like, Decades Later
When touting the merits of vaccination,
public health officials often brag about the campaign to eradicate
polio. What they rarely if ever disclose, however, is that both the
inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) developed by Jonas Salk and the
live-virus oral polio vaccine (OPV)—developed first by
Polish scientist
Hilary Koprowski and later by Albert Sabin—frequently have caused the
very condition they were supposed to prevent.
U.S. regulators fast-tracked the
Salk vaccine in 1954, deliberating for just two hours before approving
it for wide-scale use. Despite Salk’s belief that a “killed-virus”
vaccine “could not accidentally cause polio in
those inoculated,” the number of reported polio cases rose immediately
and dramatically within a year, with particularly steep increases in
some states—including a 642% spike in Massachusetts. According to one account, National Institutes of Health doctors and scientists were “well aware that the Salk vaccine was causing polio,” and some health departments even banned it. To make matters worse, in a “massive and highly publicised disaster,” over 200,000 unsuspecting children received a batch of polio vaccine later determined to be defective—manufactured
by Cutter Laboratories, the batch contained improperly inactivated
(and, therefore, live) polio virus that gave polio to at least 40,000 children.
In the early 1960s, the “cheaper to make, easier to take”
live-virus OPV began to supplant the IPV as the polio vaccine of choice
and remained in place for nearly 40 years. By then, scientists had been
testing the OPV on American children for about a decade; as reported by
Koprowski in a 2006 paper, U.S. testing of his oral vaccine took place
from 1951-1962. Sabin tested his OPV on millions of Soviet citizens in 1959, immediately followed by U.S. trials. By the summer of 1960, Sabin’s OPV was on the cusp of licensure.
Knowing that children gravitate toward
sugar, U.S. health department personnel who administered the oral polio
vaccine “helped the medicine go down” by delivering the vaccine serum on sugar cubes. By 1962, “children were lining up at school, tongues out to receive pink-stained lumps of sugar impregnated
with Albert Sabin’s live, attenuated oral polio vaccine.” What
officials neglected to tell the millions of American children who
happily crunched on their sugar cubes was that the OPV, like the IPV,
could give them full-blown, iron-lung-type polio. Nor were recipients of
either type of polio vaccine informed of their exposure to the cancer-causing viral contaminant SV40,
derived from the monkey kidneys used to produce the vaccines. When some
vaccine recipients went on to develop polio or cancer (or both), all
too often they met with an evasive and uncaring response from public
health authorities who refused to admit that their vaccines could cause
lifelong damage.
A true story
Cynthia Grady, now almost 65 years old,
is a North Carolina resident who received a coerced “sugar cube” polio
vaccine in South Carolina in July, 1960 and has lived with chronic pain
and severe health problems ever since. Grady and her nearly 85-year-old
mother, Connie Gallagher, consented to an August 2019 interview with
Children’s Health Defense to tell Grady’s tragic and hair-raising story
of vaccine injury and describe their encounters with an officialdom
apparently committed to obfuscation, stonewalling and denial of harm.
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At the time, Grady and Gallagher (who
had divorced Grady’s biological father) lived in New York. In July of
1960, Gallagher drove south to drop her “very healthy” six-year-old
daughter off with relatives in South Carolina before continuing on to
Florida to visit her parents. Unfortunately, Grady’s biological father—a
member of the South Carolina Cherokee Nation—decided to take advantage
of Gallagher’s absence and engaged in what would now be termed a
parental kidnap, whisking the bewildered child away from her aunt and
uncle shortly after her arrival. To qualify for social welfare benefits
allocated on the basis of “number of mouths being fed,” he immediately
took Grady to the Cherokee County Health Department for vaccination.
Scared and crying, Grady explained that
she had already had her vaccines, which she had received in injected
form prior to starting kindergarten the year before. Despite her
protests, the health department employee got her to swallow a sugar cube
polio vaccine. Within a couple of days, while staying in a house that
had only an outhouse, Grady began to profusely vomit and became so ill
that she was taken to an isolation room in Cherokee Memorial Hospital.
Her rapid deterioration then prompted a transfer 25 miles away to
Spartanburg General Hospital, where she found herself in a special
basement ward with 20 or more other children in similar condition. All
of the children, Grady included, were diagnosed with paralytic polio.
Grady’s laboratory report form dated
August 4, 1960 (not obtainable by the family until 2016, see below)
clearly shows that Grady and the other children in her basement ward
were closely monitored by the CDC/Public Health Service’s “Poliomyelitis
Surveillance Program.” The lab report provides evidence of positive
culturing for “monkey kidney” and also shows that Grady tested positive
for polioviruses Types I, II and III.
By the time that Gallagher received the
terrifying phone call that her daughter was in the hospital in critical
condition, Grady was in an iron lung, unable to speak and paralyzed from
the neck down. (Her time in the iron lung ultimately left her with a
scar on the back of her neck and motor neuron imbalances as well as
heart deformities.) After Gallagher rushed north to join her daughter,
finding that Grady could only move her head and blink “yes” or “no” in
response to questions, Gallagher repeatedly heard her daughter described
as being in “grave condition.”
The CDC’s Poliomyelitis Surveillance Report No. 205, published on August 5, 1960, indicates that the CDC monitored 33 cases of paralytic polio (and
10 nonparalytic cases) that occurred in the tri-county area of Cherokee
and Spartanburg counties (South Carolina) and Cleveland county in North
Carolina between June 11 and August 6, 1960. The report states that 11
of the 33 paralyzed children had previously received one or more doses
of the Salk polio vaccine but does not discuss the OPV. However, during
the many days spent at her daughter’s bedside at the Spartanburg
hospital, Gallagher learned from the other mothers present that all of
the children in the special ward had received the sugar cube vaccine and
had similar monkey kidney serum test results.
Mother and daughter recall that the CDC
“brought in equipment like you wouldn’t believe” and put Grady through
the rigors of various forms of physical therapy and rehabilitation, not
always reflecting good clinical decision-making. Gallagher reports never
receiving a single medical bill nor any medical documentation of
Grady’s treatment in South Carolina, leaving no paper trail. With Grady
still largely unable to walk, the pair eventually returned to New York
and later moved to Oregon. Many years of painful rehabilitation
followed, and it took seven years for Grady to be able to walk without
crutches. Since then, Grady has endured one costly medical problem after
another, including meningitis, tachycardia, mood swings, problems with
balance, a partial and then full hysterectomy, gallbladder and appendix
removal, ovarian cancer and more. At present, Grady has “good days and
bad days,” with many spent mostly in bed. Her ongoing balance
difficulties have led to numerous falls, concussions and broken bones.
The runaround
For years, mother and daughter tried to
obtain Grady’s hospital records, to little avail. In 2001, the
Spartanburg hospital even told Grady that they had “no record that you
were ever here.” After renewing their request in 2016, a kind hospital
employee dedicated two weeks to searching through the institution’s
microfiched archives and stumbled on the apparently suppressed records,
which included the revelatory CDC lab report.
For many years, the government
repeatedly denied Grady’s applications for Social Security Disability,
telling her that her health problems were “all in her head.” Eventually,
Social Security awarded Grady a small monthly disability stipend
(currently $645), while still periodically asking her to “jump through
hoops” such as seeing a psychiatrist.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation
Program (NVICP) was established in 1986 and became operational in the
fall of 1988. Although it included a meager provision for individuals
like Grady who had sustained vaccine injuries prior to October 1, 1988,
there were several caveats—those individuals had to know about the
NVICP, had to have medical documentation to prove the case and had to
file their claims by January 31, 1991. The program also capped the number of petitioners who
could be compensated retrospectively at 3,500; by early 1993, the
slow-moving program had only adjudicated 32% of retrospective claims and
had only awarded compensation to half of those (641 claimants). In
2014, the GAO reported that the average time to adjudicate a claim
remained three and a half years.
From the beginning, the NVICP has done
little to publicize its existence, so it is unsurprising that Grady and
Gallagher did not learn about it until decades after the 1991 deadline
for filing a retroactive claim. Moreover, the hospital in Spartanburg
did not hand over Grady’s medical records until 2016. When Grady and
Gallagher first reached out to the NVICP, the program told them to get a
lawyer and sent them a list of 150 attorneys. More than 75 attorneys
refused to take the case: “We couldn’t get an attorney to touch it with a
10-foot pole.” In an unanswered letter to President Trump, Grady noted
her stepfather’s military service during World War II and stated that
she had been “raised to believe that this is one great country and that
there is justice for all,” adding that something was “wrong with this
picture” when a criminal gets a court-appointed attorney while she
couldn’t get one.
Next, Grady asked for help from her
congressional representative, Congressman Mark Meadows. For eight
months, the Congressman’s staff tried to help and even submitted a
complete set of paperwork to the NVICP. After months of getting nowhere,
the Congressman’s staff was unable to continue dedicating scarce time
to the case.
Finally, aware of a legal provision called “equitable tolling,” Grady and Gallagher filed a retrospective pro se petition (i.e., without an attorney) on April 6, 2017. Equitable tolling “means
that a person is not required to sue within the statutory period if he
cannot in the circumstances reasonably be expected to do so.” The NVICP
assigned a case number (17-509V) and a Special Master (Mindy Michaels
Roth), conducted two audiotaped status conferences by phone and asked
for a complete set of medical records, information about current health
status, and equitable tolling paperwork; months later, Special Master
Roth dismissed the petition “on
statute of limitations grounds.” Grady followed up with a motion for
review, which was met first by inappropriate procedural steps and then
by complete closure of the case.
The dismissal document refers to a prior
legal decision discussing the intent of the 1986 Act that put the NVICP
in place, stating that while “Congress sought to extend relief to those
vaccinated before the Act went into effect,” it “also wanted to provide
the government with a definite date after which it would no longer have
to defend against any such retroactive suits.” In other words, “tough
luck.” In a phone conversation between Grady and Special Master Roth and
a Department of Justice attorney, Grady asked, “What am I, your
collateral damage?” The reply was, “Well, if you have to put it that
way.”
Collateral damage
Historians admit that the history of polio vaccines is littered with unsavory “tough choices”—as
one historical account puts it, “the scientists who raced toward
effective polio vaccines tested their work on prisoners,
institutionalized children, and tens of thousands of monkeys.” A
Harvard-based writer goes even further, stating that “The success of
mass immunization…comes at a price” and that “Many children…suffer major injuries and death from the administration of vaccines.”
n 2000, the U.S. stopped administering
oral polio vaccines and reverted to the IPV after being forced by
outraged parents to admit that the OPV was resulting in an unacceptably
high number of actual cases of polio in children. (The OPV is still in
wide use in many other countries.) Dr. Walter Orenstein, then the
director of the CDC’s vaccination program, unashamedly described his
prior stance, stating that when a small number of children a year
contracted polio but millions were assumed to be protected, “my feeling
was it was a small price to pay.” However, when confronted with the tragic story of a young man, David Salamone, who died at age 28 of
complications from childhood vaccine-induced polio, Orenstein seemingly
changed his tune, saying “Suddenly, the eight to 10 people were not
just tiny numbers but were real people. Just seeing how these people’s
lives were ruined made a big difference.”
Grady, likewise, wants people to understand that she is a “real person.” As she states:
I want to be able to tell my story and to help change these time constraints on timely filing and make these people understand that it is the residuals of the polio monkey kidney serum that took a 6-year-old girl and many, many others years of distress, misdiagnosis with health problems, caused heart problems, cancer and motor neuron problems with the brain and lots of other disability. I want them to understand that we were not properly informed that there was even a vaccine compensation program back in the ‘80s, that our records were suppressed [for] over 50 years by the CDC and that they were derelict in their duty to follow up and admit the wrongdoing.
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