Jonas Salk & the Polio Vaccine — Impact-Driven Category Spotlight

Karthiga Ratnam
4 min readApr 6, 2021

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“The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.” — Leo Tolstoy

The pandemic. It started over a year ago. Then came the vaccine race. Each company competed to get its vaccine out first. Then, vaccine hoarding by rich countries started.

There are few players in the market — Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Sinopharm, and Sputnik v vaccine, and a few more. There are of varying degrees in efficacy.

Fatima Bhutto recently wrote an excellent piece on the Guardian. Here are the key takeaways:

  • Rich countries have only 14% of the global population, yet they “hoard” 53% of the best vaccines
  • Pretty much all the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines have been bought by rich nations
  • Moderna is not even being offered in poor countries
  • The EU exported 34 million doses to Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong
  • South Africa with its own variant of COVID is the country worst hit by COVID-19. They are purchasing the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine at prices uptown 2 1/5 times higher than EU countries
  • Canada has bought enough to vaccinate its population 5 times
  • The population of Africa is roughly 1.3 billion -no of doses allocated? 300 million
  • On the other side of the spectrum, China and Russia have donated 800 million doses to 41 countries
  • India too has donated 15.6 million doses to 17 countries

Have we learned nothing? Richer countries didn’t want to impose strict COVID-19 protocols when the pandemic hit. And now they are hoarding vaccines? How are we supposed to get back to normal if half the world isn’t vaccinated?

This global power struggle has to STOP! It leads to more poverty, more inequality, and more hate. We cannot afford to keep going down this path again. Which part of an extinction-level threat do we not get? COVID-19 didn’t care about nation-states and neither does climate change.

I’m not even going to go into how we are dragging this pandemic out by playing politics with the COVID-19 vaccine.

At this time I am reminded of Jonas Salk.

Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instituto_Butantan_2016_084_-_Jonas_Salk.jpg, Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net).

Dr. Jonas Salk was born in 1914 in New York. He is a physician, virologist, and researcher. He became head of the Virus Research Lab at the Pittsburg University. Towards the mid-1940s he started researching a vaccine for polio.

Polio — a crippling disease that has afflicted humanity throughout history. The disease has had its ups and downs. Generally affecting the world in epidemic waves.

In 1952, Jonas Salk started initial testing for the polio vaccine. In one of the biggest clinical trials in recorded medical history — 1.8 million kids were inoculated.

In 1955, the vaccine was approved for public use.

Jonas Salk chose not to patent the vaccine or benefit from it. What he wanted was to “maximize global distribution.” By 1959, Salk’s polio vaccine was in use in 90 countries. And yet he never profited from it.

Thanks to Dr. Salk’s work, an oral vaccine became available — made by Albert Sabin.

The impact? Thanks to the efforts of The Global Polio Eradication Initiative — a 30 plus year program Polio is eradicated in almost every continent. Except in two countries in Asia — Afghanistan, and Pakistan. They have one endemic strain left to eradicate.

Let’s look at the current pandemic and the COVID-19 vaccine for a second.

In the light of what is happening on our planet today, Jonas Salk’s actions and impact seem even more amplified. Jonas Salk hailed was born to immigrant parents who had no formal education. He didn’t have the pedigree or the money. He didn’t have an inheritance to fall back on.

Edward Murrow famously interviewed Jonas Salk. Here’s the bit that we really need to hear, transcribed:

Edward Murrow — Who owns the patent to the vaccine?

Jonas Salk — Well the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?

In 2014, Forbes highlighted that had Jonas Salk patented his vaccine, he would have been $7 billion richer.

But I believe Jonas Salk was much richer than the $7 billion. His contribution to humanity was priceless. At a time when the planet is at a crossroads, it is important for us to remind ourselves of people like Jonas Salk. The impact they had on this planet.

The impact they continue to have every day. You can see it in a mother’s eyes every time her child born without infantile paralysis — polio. That’s the power of individual impact.

I will leave you with this quote by Jonas Salk:

Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality. — Source — https://www.salk.edu/about/history-of-salk/jonas-salk/

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Karthiga Ratnam
Karthiga Ratnam

Written by Karthiga Ratnam

Impact-Driven Category Designer | Working group member Wicked 7

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