Trump vs Roosevelt: How the US once led a fight against a deadly virus but is losing it today

When polio was the most feared disease 70 years ago, the US spearheaded the battle for a vaccine. Compare that effort with Trump’s bizarre and chaotic response to the pandemic, which has produced a death toll in the US higher than anywhere else in the world. By Patrick Cockburn

Salk created a vaccine for polio but it took half a century with support from science and the goverment (Getty)

The two epidemics that have most terrified the US in the last 100 years are Covid-19 today and the devastating polio epidemic that ravaged the country for 40 years between the New York polio epidemic of 1916 and the successful use of the Salk vaccine after 1955. The polio virus caused extreme terror because it was highly infectious, crippled or, more rarely, killed children and seemed impossible to stop. Prior to mass inoculation, it appeared in waves that became bigger and more lethal as the years went by. The current pandemic is frequently compared to Spanish flu in 1918-19, which led to the death of millions, but it was of short duration. In many respects, the coronavirus epidemic has closer similarities to polio because in both cases many are infected by the virus, but only a small proportion die or are disabled.

The discovery of an effective polio vaccine was one of the greatest scientific achievements of the US in the 20th century, comparable to landing a man on the moon – and of much more use to humanity. Success did not come easily and there were many false steps: the life-cycle and mode of attack of the polio virus, in so far as a virus is alive, turned out to be very different and more complicated than originally supposed. Jonas Salk, who was to be followed several years later by Albert Sabin, received great acclaim for eliminating the disease through developing different vaccines. But their ultimate success was built on the work of other scientists and laboratories that had contributed to understanding the deadly virus.