The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis | M.D., Paul A. Offit | The Cutter Incident

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The Cutter Inciden...

	The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis M.D., Paul A. Offit Yale University Press, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Vaccines have saved more lives than any other single medical advance. Yet today only four companies make vaccines, and there is a growing crisis in vaccine availability. Why has this happened? This remarkable book recounts for the first time a devastating episode in 1955 at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, thathas led many pharmaceutical companies to abandon vaccine manufacture.

Drawing on interviews with public health officials, pharmaceutical company executives, attorneys, Cutter employees, and victims of the vaccine, as well as on previously unavailable archives, Dr. Paul Offit offers a full account of the Cutter disaster. He describes the nation?s relief when the polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk in 1955, the production of the vaccine at industrial facilities such as the one operated by Cutter, and the tragedy that occurred when 200,000 people were inadvertently injected with live virulent polio virus: 70,000 became ill, 200 were permanently paralyzed, and 10 died. Dr. Offit also explores how, as a consequence of the tragedy, one jury?s verdict set in motion events that eventually suppressed the production of vaccines already licensed and deterred the development of new vaccines that hold the promise of preventing other fatal diseases.

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Quite fascinating

In 1952, the United States suffered its worst ever polio epidemic, with 58,000 people affected. The race was on to perfect a vaccine that would bring this scourge under control. In 1955, following several breakthrough, a vaccine was created, and a huge trial was conducted, involving some 800,000 children, of whom 600,000 were given the vaccine (the rest were given a placebo). However, it quickly became apparent that something had gone wrong. Before all was said and done, 40,000 children contracted polio, 200 were permanently paralyzed, and 10 died. The race was on to find out what had gone wrong.

1955 was still the dawn of the vaccine era, and there was much to be learned. However, in the aftermath of the vaccine, liability law was changed in a way that seemed minor at the time, but has resulted in a dearth of vaccines and vaccine makers. Do you want to know why 2004 witnessed a shortage of flu vaccines? Read this book and find out!

Overall, I must say that I found this book to be quite fascinating. The author does a good job of retelling what happened, and what its ramifications were and are. It seems quite ironic that something that went wrong at the dawn of vaccines is bringing the era of vaccines to a close! If you want to know how we got from that seemingly glorious era of ever new vaccines, which seemed to promise a disease free future, to day, then you must read this book. I highly recommend it!

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The Cutter Incident

The author presents the science and legal outcomes of this polio vaccine disaster in a clear and easy-to-understand manner. While telling a historical event, the author was aptly able to show how families today are still being affected-making this book a great read for those who have wondered just what is going on with vaccines, vaccine shortages, and the vaccine industry.

A real problem and a contentious solution

There's a lot of noise about vaccines today, what with bird flu and who knows what over the horizon, but nothing compared with 50 years ago, when the Salk polio vaccine was introduced.
People younger than about 60 years old can hardly imagine the fear that gripped American parents every summer then. The shadow of the iron lung was far more terrifying than the shadow of the atomic bomb.
Salk vaccine worked and, under proper controls, was safe.
But controls were not proper, and vaccine made by Cutter Laboratories killed 10 people and paralyzed a few hundred more. At least several hundred thousand Americans were exposed to live polio virus. More did not become severely ill because fewer than one percent of people exposed to wild virus show symptoms.
Physician Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher and pediatrician in Philadelphia, says the "Cutter Incident" was more than just a forgotten medical mishap.
The net Offit casts brings back an amazing variety of things: research on aborted fetuses, Eddie Cantor and Nancy Reagan, Nobel Prizes and presidential politics, irresponsible journalists, backstabbing researchers.
Offit, a skilled expository writer, packs a lot of information into the first 130 pages to set up his current concern: That the fallout from Cutter Laboratories' bad vaccine led to legal precedents that continue to endanger lives today.
In other words, Offit has reached back half a century to find a hook on which to hang a plea for tort "reform."
Tort reform is a swamp with only a narrow causeway through it.
On the left hand lie the plaintiffs' lawyers, greedy, sensationalist and underhanded, as exemplified by the Milli Vanilli raid. On the right hand lie the corporate lawyers, who want their employers to enjoy all the benefits of legal personhood without any of the responsibility that flesh-and-blood persons bear.
However, it gets complicated.
For every flimflamming plaintiff's lawyer, there's a hard-fighting advocate who puts up his own money (in one case I know of, by taking out a second mortgage on his home) to get justified satisfaction for a penniless victim.
And for every Wall Street Journal editorial writer whose idea of reform is "loser pays" -- that is, the rich buy verdicts -- there's a corporation ruined by lies flogged by "consumer rights activists" -- Bendectin, for example, a safe drug no longer available to pregnant women.
Offit's proposal, not new but not catching on either, is for "drug courts," expert tribunals .
Instead of juries, his courts would have specially trained judges who could call on court-paid, neutral experts to assist judges to rule up or down on a vaccine's safety.
It is inevitable that when tens of millions are treated, some persons receiving even safe vaccines will have medical disasters, and it is not always easy to prove whether the vaccine was involved or not. In Offit's plan, a fund would compensate the authentically injured without necessarily affixing blame.
It would be not unlike no-fault auto insurance, although even closer to an existing federal National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
Offit believes it could recompense the injured (or merely unlucky) fairly while heading off frivolous lawsuits and encouraging pharmaceutical manufacturers to press on with research in risky, less lucrative areas of medicine.
Certainly Offit is on firm ground when he pleads to get decisions out of the hands of citizen jurors. If polls of Americans' beliefs and backgrounds are reliable, then on the typical jury of 12 persons, there are two or three who believe that disease is caused by demons, and not even one with any detailed knowledge about what viruses are or vaccines do.
As a result, we have got what Offit calls "a court system that functions as a national lottery for health care."

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