The polio vaccine
The polio vaccine was not developed through animal experiments. This claim is repeated by pro-vivisectionists, but is entirely false.
Before developing the vaccine, it was essential to learn about the virus and how people contracted it.
In 1910 it was announced that polio was contracted via the nose, based on monkey experiments by Flexner and Lewis. They identified the lymph channels, blood vessels and tiny nerves under the mucous covering the nose to be transmitting the virus. [1] Flexner then managed to deliberately infect monkeys through the nose.[2] The nasal infection theory contradicted autopsy findings, but was still believed; autopsied indicated infection in humans was through the digestive tract.[3] The theory involving the digestive tract was established in the very early1900s by study of two polio epidemics in Sweden. [4] It wasn’t until 1938 that the nasal theory was challenged, the real route of infection was identified.[5] In the meantime forty years and countless deaths had passed.
The role of animal experiments in delaying understanding is acknowledged: Dr J R Paul's 'A History of Poliomyelitis' summarised : "So the theoretical fundamentalists, like so many who have immuned themselves in the laboratories before and since, drifted further away from the human disease in their attempts to use experiments in the monkey for the interpretation of the disease in man."[6]Paul also stated that reliance on the monkey results meant: "The clock had been set back about twenty-five years in poliomyelitis research".[7]
Sabin, who eventually developed the polio vaccine, stated that: “It became necessary to extend the studies to human volunteers when it was found that poliovirus, which were devoid of paralytogenic activity in chimpanzees, multiplied poorly or not at all in the alimentary tract of monkeys; and that amounts of virus that multiplied poorly or not at all in the alimentary tract of chimpanzees multiplied very well in the intestinal tract of susceptible human volunteers"[8]. Sabin himself later stated on oath to the US Congress that the polio vaccine had been delayed by decades due to misleading animal data. He testified that “...the work on prevention (of polio) was long delayed by the erroneous conception of the nature of the human disease based on misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys.”[9]
References
1 Flexner, S Lewis PA, Journal of Experimental Medicine, 1910, Vol 10, p39
2 Paul, JR, 1971 'A History of Poliomyelitis'. Yale University Press, p243
3 Dowling HF. Fighting Infection. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1977.
4 Wickman I. Studien ziber Poliomyelitis acuta; zugleich em Beitrag zur Kennrnis der Myelitis acuta. Berlin, Karger, 1905. Wickman I. Beitrage zur Kenntnis der Heine-Medinschen Krankheit. Berlin, Karger, 1907.
5 Paul, JR, 1971 'A History of Poliomyelitis'. Yale University Press, p244-245
6 Paul, JR, 1971 'A History of Poliomyelitis'. Yale University Press, p245
7 Paul, JR, 1971 'A History of Poliomyelitis'. Yale University Press, p385
8 Sabin,AB. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics. vol 4. 1963.
9 Albert Sabin MD statement before the subcommittee on Hospitals and Health Care, Committee on Veterans Affairs, House of Representatives, April 26, 1984 serial no. 98-48