Scientific experimentation, debate and selflessness on the way to today’s vaccines

Meredith Wadman's book The Vaccine Race was reviewed in the Washington Post.

Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, I suffered through chicken pox and measles, like millions of other American kids, and I belonged to the first generation to receive the brand-new polio vaccines in national campaigns. My parents had friends permanently paralyzed by polio; the mother of a schoolmate gave birth to a baby who was deaf, nearly blind and suffering a severe intellectual disability from rubella (“German measles”) contracted during pregnancy.

Within a half-century, vaccines have made these and other once-common viral diseases so rare in the United States that doctors being trained today may never see cases of them, and some parents worry more about the small or hypothetical risks of vaccinating children than about the risks of leaving them unprotected. It takes events such as the 2015 measles outbreak among visitors to Disneyland in California or the recent emergence of the Zika virus — so dangerous to the brain of a developing fetus — to remind us not to take our freedom from infectious diseases for granted.

In this meticulously researched history of the high-stakes race to develop effective vaccines against polio, rubella, rabies and other viruses, science writer and physician Meredith Wadman tells the story of these near-miraculous medical achievements of the post-World War II era. The Vaccine Race also details the risks posed by some of the early products — risks that arose, in part, because to make the vaccines, researchers first had to invent techniques for growing viruses such as polio or rubella in living cells, without knowing what other viruses those host cells might harbor. Even when a courageous government scientist, Bernice Eddy, and colleagues showed that monkey cells used to produce the Salk polio vaccine and other vaccines contained a virus, SV40, that could cause malignant changes in human cells, government officials at first discounted the evidence and allowed such vaccines to remain on the market.