LGM Film Club, Part 92: Polio Vaccination

Happy Vaccination Day! This is actually a day to celebrate, the first time someone received a COVID vaccination from a carefully vetted and approved vaccine. It was in Britain and not the U.S., but still, today is the start of the end of the COVID-19 era. And that’s a real victory. Is it a victory equal to Jonas Salk’s discovery of the polio vaccine? Depends on how one wants to define it. Crippled children versus wiping out our elderly family members is not really something easy to measure. But in any case, tonight’s film club celebrates this with this 1960 footage of testing the second wave of polio vaccinations, a few years after Salk developed the first in 1955. In this wave, oral vaccinations replaced the shot.