Part One: How We Beat Polio But Not the Mythmaking Around Jonas Salk
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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's people trying to do good things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week, I have a guest. I guess I usually have a guest. But this week, I have a guest named Annie Rees. Hi, how are you? I'm good. I feel like that's a loaded question these days, but yes, I'm good. How are you? I'm also good with air quotes everywhere. Yes. I'm very excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. And if people haven't heard of you, which is surprising, you are one of the hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told You. And you're also a host of Savor, which is a food podcast. And I haven't actually heard that one yet. But I am learning more and more about how I care about food in terms of like culture and politics and history and stuff. And I just really appreciate y'all's tagline. There's no you in Savor.

Thank you. We actually, the show is big on puns and bad jokes, if you'll allow me to say. But yes, that is a huge part of Savers that I feel like a lot of times people divorce food from politics when they really shouldn't and history when they really shouldn't. And there's just so much to learn from what you're eating every day.

So that's my pitch for Saver. I want to hear it now. I like Stuff Mom Never Told You, and I think people will like these things too. And if there's one thing you can say about the current administration, this is not going to be an episode about the current administration. Oh, I have to do the rest of the introductions, including Sophie, who's our producer. Hi, Sophie. Damn, was she just going to forget me? I got a bright pink hat on. I never forget you, Sophie. I would never forget you. Thank you. Thank you. And good houseplants. Always good houseplants. Thank you.

Pretty bushy behind me today. I'm like, oh, I want to touch it. We also have a new audio engineer who's Eva. Everyone wants to say hi to Eva. Hi, Eva. Hi, Eva. Hi, Eva. Eva's great. I was going to put that out there. Yeah, and actually Eva's been editing our book club, one of my other shows, the Cool Zone Media Book Club for a while now. Don't worry. We didn't get rid of Rory. Rory's just working on a different project.

Yeah, mining coal. Yeah. Actually, not doing the mining of the coal, but if you hang out in a cage, you can keep track of when there's bad chemicals in the air. I feel like we should make people at least, you know, say hi to Rory one more time, I think. Hello, Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. If you want to say hi to Rory more, he's editing Behind the Bastards now. Oh, yeah. Well, okay.

The current administration thing. Yeah, what's going on there? That was like a really wild little teaser you did. So I went and did a... Have you all ever heard of lavender graduations? No. No, I have not. I hadn't, and I'm kind of embarrassed that I hadn't. It's LGBT groups on college campuses have a graduation ceremony. Uh-huh. And I went and did a talk at one yesterday as we record this, and...

I was very like, how is this going to go? They hired a kind of fiery anarchist to come give them their LGBT speech. I'm going to tell them about gay people who had burned down Nazi records. And then it kind of helped realizing that everyone is really aware that things aren't okay right now. So that was kind of actually promising. So in a weird way, the one nice thing you can say about the current situation is that no one has their head in the sands in the same degree anymore. That's fair.

Did it go well? Oh, yeah. The event went great. It was really heartwarming, actually. It was a very like, oh, the kids are all right kind of moment, which is condescending to say because they're not kids. They're like 22. I don't know how old people are when they graduate college. 22? Who knows? I don't know anymore. Yeah. So...

If there is one thing, this does actually relate to what we're going to talk about this week and a lot in the near future. If there's one thing I can say about the current administration of the United States, it's that it has made us realize that there's an awful lot of stuff we take for granted, right? Like I've never been a big like government person. This is just true about me, right? But I'm a big like social services person, but I'm like, oh, there's all of these things that are really, really good that we try to do as a society. And, uh,

We like stuff that society tends to do for us. And a lot of that stuff is being taken away. So I've decided to spend some time focusing on these everyday miracles that we take for granted. Things that our parents or grandparents might not have taken for granted. Things that we can no longer take for granted. So this week, I want to talk about vaccines. Ooh, yes. I like vaccines. Vaccines are cool as hell.

easily in the top five best things humans have come up with. I don't know what the other four on that list are, but probably burritos. Specifically, I want to talk about the polio vaccines. And I'm going to use the plural here on purpose because people talk about the polio vaccine as if there's one vaccine and there is a whole wild history behind polio vaccines. And they have functionally, but not literally eradicated polio. Have you heard much of this story?

No, but I do have a friend who works at the CDC. She has not been fired yet. Oh, shit. Yes. And she is the biggest proponent of vaccines. She like if you catch her at a party, somehow vaccines will come up. And a polio vaccine is one of her favorite stories to tell. So I know it's got a history behind it. And a different history than I thought it did.

Because this week's story is going to follow an arc that is familiar to regular listeners of the show and that Sophie and I spend a lot of our time complaining about in Signal Chats, which is that I start off researching, usually a guy who is famous for having accomplished something, right? And then I spend a week researching. I read most of a biography. I read a whole bunch of other stuff. I get about 90% through my research when I find out

Something that makes me have to change everything about the story. It happens all too often. It's so annoying. It has happened when I've researched women before, but it happens all the time with men where you're like, oh, and you're going to research this person. And then you're like, oh, they kind of were a horrible monster to the people closest to them. Or actually, all of this is myth making and they're a con artist or just like whatever it is, you know? Yeah. Taking credit a lot of times. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaking of taking credit, you ever heard of a guy named Jonas Salk? Have. Yes. This is the man. Sophia, have you heard of this guy? No. I hadn't. And I think that like you and I live under a specific rock because like at least everything I've read has been like, oh, yes, the most household name medicine person in the world. And I'm like, I have never heard of this man. Yeah. What have you heard of Jonas Salk before I tell you about Jonas Salk? I just knew he was involved in like...

I just have heard his name from my elementary school days, perhaps. That makes sense. Yeah. Jonas Salk, the man who defeated polio. He was a Jewish guy raised poor in New York City from a family of Eastern European immigrants. He worked his entire life to fight disease and make the world a better place. And along the way, he became a sort of medical rock star for his work developing a polio vaccine.

He is famous for saying he refused to patent this vaccine because the world needed it. He said in an interview, quote, how can you patent the sun? And that what I just read you is true ish. It is so close to true that it is a massive fuck off lie. It is such a lie. Fascinating. And I like I learned that about seven hours ago.

You learn something every day. I know. Like the fact that the thing you've been researching for five days nonstop isn't true. It's not even like true kind of. It is. It's so true that it becomes a lie. Oh, okay. He did develop a polio vaccine. He developed the first polio vaccine. The first functional one was we'll talk about. He didn't actually. We'll get to it. Okay. The first polio vaccine that was widely tested is often called the Salk vaccine.

And he worked to do that with a private anti-communist foundation, one that claimed that public investment in research was how communism would win in America. So it couldn't be publicly funded. This is not reflecting the politics of Jonas Salk himself, but this is the organization that funded him. His vaccine saved uncountable lives, mostly white middle and upper class lives in the United States of America. Then,

Another Eastern European Jewish man who also came up in New York City developed a polio vaccine in partnership between American and Soviet scientists. This vaccine was cheap, more easily administered, and really slightly more dangerous by one context and less dangerous by another context. That vaccine ended polio.

After polio was effectively destroyed, the U.S. went back to Salk's vaccine. Because when you have plenty of time and medical facilities and can do booster shots and all that stuff, Salk's vaccine edges out a little bit. So it was not Jonas Salk who beat polio. It wasn't even Albert Sabin, who's his direct competitor, the one who I just said, who

Because no one person beat polio. It was an enormous undertaking by thousands of researchers from across the world that beat polio. And the great man theory of history is once again, a bunch of fucking garbage. And I didn't know most of that when I wrote this fucking episode. So consider it a story about how myths are built. But first, we're going to talk about polio. I don't know anyone who's had polio to my knowledge. And that is because I was born after these vaccines.

Poliomyelitis is a viral infection. Most infections are either bacterial or viral, and this one's viral. It has been around for kind of forever, at least thousands of years. It was first given a name in the 18th century, and then it started really fucking people up in the 19th century. Actually, the places it first really hit was Europe and then the United States in the 19th century. In 1908 or 1909, I have read both.

A guy actually looked really close and was like, "I have seen the actual virus that does this." And that has got to be a strange time to be a scientist where you're like, "Ah, I am looking through a microscope and seeing the actual object." Yes. I can't imagine back in those days where you were just, "This looks different. I'm not sure why. Let me try to come up with some reason."

Just the way we've understood viruses throughout time and how that's changed is fascinating to me, honestly. Yeah, totally. And I'm kind of excited about all the things that people are going to look back 100 years from now if they're still alive and the world hasn't been cooked to death. But otherwise, I'm like excited about all the things. I'll be like, remember when people thought the following, you know? Right. Polio was absolutely terrifying to people.

It barely causes any symptoms in most people. So it's easily transmitted. So like adults get it and transmit it, but they don't, they're not affected by it basically. Not most of the time. It is transmitted through the fecal oral route, which is, there's just like different ways that, you know, is the following thing airborne? This is the kind of fun thing that's fun to talk about at parties. Actually, well, with your friend, it probably is fun to talk about at parties. She does love talking about it. Yeah.

My favorite thing I like bringing up is that hand sanitizer doesn't do anything for fecal-oral route diseases. And so you actually need to wash your hands after you go to the bathroom. You can't just, like, use hand sanitizer. Yeah. Makes me real popular. Yeah. These are the fun things in life. I know. This is why I go to so many parties and I'm invited everywhere. That sounds like you. Yeah, totally.

It is my goal to be invited to all the parties. It is not my goal to go to all the parties. Oh, yeah. 100%. I want to be invited, but I'm not coming. Like, please keep inviting me because if you don't, I'll be really sad about it. But I'm not coming. I know. I get so sad about it. What if you're not re-invited? Which is fair, but still not okay. No. Okay. Oh, okay.

The best is when you have a friend where you can invite each other to things and you know it's safe because you know that both of you are going to be like, yeah, I got to hang out with my dog today. Sorry. Got to have that like dog back burner excuse. Yeah, totally. I'm good. My favorite. They're like, oh, my dog is just kind of needs to get home soon. My dog is starting to get socially exhausted. My dog has to record some podcasts in the morning. Yeah, there you go. So polio almost exclusively affects children.

And I'm going to get into it because polio might come back because of the motherfucker in charge of the fucking, anyway, whatever. We'll get to that. When you first get polio, you get a runny nose and a sore throat. Then you get a fever, then horrible pain throughout all your muscles or some of your muscles, depending, leaving you thrashing and misery in your bed. Then when the fever breaks, it's not over. It means the virus has moved from the blood to the nervous system.

Within a few days, your muscles become paralyzed. But your body doesn't go numb. You can still feel all your muscles. You just can't use them. Among people catch it symptomatically like this, I have read a 10% mortality rate and I have read a 25% mortality rate. I believe the lower number. It kills you by paralyzing essential functions. If it goes up in your brain, you will stop being able to swallow. You'll foam at the mouth and drown. It's bad. Yeah, that sounds terrible.

You, the listener, have probably seen, have you all seen the pictures of iron lungs? Yes. Yes. So they have been used for other things. It's like if your lungs are paralyzed, this is the object that would help you back in the day. Now we use intubation and other things more often. Although iron lungs have come back thanks to COVID, iron lungs are huge metal tubes that you go into with only your head sticking out. And the machine varies the air pressure, so it sort of breathes for you. Your head's not in it, but basically it's like...

forces your chest to expand, it brings airs in. It's like manually working a bellows. If your lungs are paralyzed, you need this thing. Most people only spent about two weeks or a couple of months in the iron lung while recovering, but plenty of people, and every time I say people when I'm talking about polio, I'm talking about children. Plenty of children, well, I guess in this case, people, lived their entire lives in iron lungs.

There is one woman, Martha Lillard, who got polio in 1953 when she was five years old, who is still alive as of when I looked and still lives in one. And she's having trouble finding parts to keep her iron lung in good repair because she's the only person living in one long-term left. People often regain some use of their muscles, but generally people were disabled for life. And polio scared the piss out of everyone. It was killing and paralyzing children.

The most famous polio survivor is Franklin Roosevelt, the progressive who served as president of this country for the longest and could scarcely walk and relied on leg braces and wheelchairs. So in 1916, there was this massive polio outbreak in New York City. Basically, summertime in major cities was polio's time to shine. Babies were dying of polio at a fantastic and terrible rate, one every two and a half hours.

Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's too often. I've read so many stories about doctors who are like, I don't know, just like walking through these wards and just being like watching children dying constantly. And there's a lot of emotional stuff I didn't put in this part of it. Its transmission wasn't yet understood. People assumed it was airborne, basically, and they tried everything to stop it. Families were quarantined. Windows were screened to keep flies away. The trash got picked up extra well. Those two things actually probably help some.

Playgrounds were shut down. Kids had their noses and throats rinsed with salt water daily, which has got to be one of the worst things that I can imagine happening on a daily basis. Most tragically, 72,000 stray cats were killed by the city because people thought they spread it. And none of it worked. But you know what did work to save everyone who has polio? And Sophie, I think we can promise that all of the following people are capable of curing polio.

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And we're back. But unfortunately, they didn't have the products that support this podcast yet.

Or they might. I don't know what we got advertised. Some of that stuff has been around for a while. But they didn't have enough of it. They didn't even have podcasts back then. They had to listen to people on soapboxes and radio. Actually, we've been doing basically the equivalent of podcasts forever. Yeah. I mean, honestly, if you're thinking about... A lot of this sounds like COVID to me. And I feel like the...

whole manosphere thing that happened during COVID where people were isolated and they didn't have real information and they were just like, I don't know, I don't understand. That a lot of negative things around health came out of that. And it's still impacting us to this day, which I'm sure we'll talk about. Yeah, there's a lot of overlaps between this. And we will talk about some really early anti-vaxxers during this.

But there was actually this thing where like, it seems like from the reading that more people were willing to trust experts than like currently. That's fun. Yeah. Love that. People started fleeing the city. And to be clear, there's outbreaks everywhere. But New York City is like particularly bad. 1200 kids a day escaped the city with their families for a little while. But then other cities soon stopped letting them come in.

Kids and babies were taken to Kingston Avenue Hospital and quarantined for two months away from their families. And then cops would go around and steal children from their families to take them to the hospital. I only got one sentence of that, and I want to know more about what happened there. Was it like you got a runny nose, now you got to go to the, you know, quarantine death land? I don't know. The police are coming. You know...

I have had a couple of instances where I have had something like swine flu. And basically they've been like, you're going to this quarantine zone. And I didn't know what was happening and they just told me where to go. Wait, you've been quarantined? By who? What happened? I was quarantined multiple times. One time when I was flying into the US, that was when I had bird flu.

One time at college when I had swine flu and they didn't want to report it because if they had to report it, they would have shut down the university. And then another time where a doctor was just like, please go home and quarantine. I feel really great about that. That made me really confident. Yeah, they basically were like, just don't tell anybody. Go back to your dorm. Yeah.

I feel really confident about the American education system. I feel like we're really setting the priorities straight. They did give me a mask and some gloves and the instructions to stay in my room away from people for a couple of days. College kids are notoriously good at following instructions. Definitely. It was also Halloween. I remember very specifically. Jesus Christ. My Halloween costume is the person with mask and gloves.

I did stay in my room. That's good. I did. Yes. That's good. So if there's ever like a new animal named flu, are you just personally convinced that you're going to get it? Kind of. Like once there's like a snake flu, I'm like staying away from you for a while. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's a really fair response, honestly. Well, just like the thing that saved you, the epidemic stopped because summer stopped.

2,400 people, mostly kids under five, died in New York City that summer, and around 9,000 were paralyzed. Nationwide, 27,000 kids died or were paralyzed, and I don't know which because it was confusingly written and I tried to cross-reference, but it doesn't always work. It was a bad summer. Every summer across the world, polio came back, and it mostly slowly got worse. 15,000 kids a year were disabled by polio in the United States.

And this peaked in 1952. In the early 1950s, the thing that most Americans were afraid of was nuclear war, which makes sense. The second thing after that, that they were the most afraid of was polio. And it's like one of those things where it's like polio is just like an old timey disease. You're like, oh, that couldn't have been like that bad. We're still around as a species. And I've never met anyone with polio, you know? Right. Maybe most people are better at thinking things through than I would have been, but.

Yeah, it had a huge impact, though. I know we've talked about it, but in terms of like the ADA and all those kind of things. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that we're not going to get into too much, but the start of the disability rights movement and also the start of the concept of physical therapy comes out of polio. And of course, polio.

That was done by a woman and isn't as written about as much. And then I'm as guilty as anyone else because instead I'm going to complain about a man. That's the main thing I'm going to do this episode. Yeah. I mean, you know, sometimes you just got to complain about a man. Yeah. Totally. Totally. In 1955, the polio vaccine, the first one was administered and it

The way it's usually presented is that basically overnight, polio dropped from disabling 15,000 kids a year to about 100 cases a year. This isn't true. It did start turning the tide dramatically, but it wasn't until 1962, I think, when the other vaccine that we'll talk about later came in that it started dropping to 100 cases a year. So was it a kind of marketing thing?

It's that people want a simple history with a hero. Yeah. And Jonas Salk, the guy that we're going to talk about mostly, was a hero. He stopped polio, you know? By 1979, polio was effectively eliminated in the United States until the modern anti-vax movement, which is basically a death cult. In 2022, the U.S. got some cases of polio for the first time since 1979. Wow.

Great. Yeah, with RFK Jr. in charge. Moving forward. Well, let's talk about that real quick. RFK Jr., soon to be remembered as one of history's greatest monsters. Yes. He has gone on record to say that the polio vaccine has, quote, killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did. Such an idiot. Uh-huh. Wow. Because he was like, oh, he gives people cancer or something.

And also, he claims that the vaccine didn't actually reduce polio cases, that it is, quote, a mythology and, quote, just not true. Studies have shown, of course, that the polio vaccine does not cause cancer and that polio has been pretty much completely eliminated worldwide because of these vaccines.

Everyone of every political party who allowed RFK Jr. to come to power has fucking blood on their hands. Yeah, polio is bad. And it was real bad. And this is the story about people developing the vaccine. But it actually starts in its way with people fighting against the flu. So we're gonna talk about the flu real quick too. The flu is way harder to vaccinate against, although we do it fairly well regardless. People should get their flu shots.

I never bothered because I was like, I'm young and can do whatever. And then I like have a doctor friend and he's like, that's not the point. The point is that if you don't get it, old people die. I'm also like closer and closer to an honorary old person myself. Yeah. I had the same thing where I was like, I don't need it. It just kind of makes me feel a little off for a couple of days. Why should I get it? And then somebody sat me down and was like,

It's not just about you. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of the point. Totally. And there's like some people who can't get the shot at all because they're immunocompromised. I think there's 17 million people living in the US who have actual medical reasons that they can't get vaccinated, do an immunocompromisation, whatever. We still successfully vaccinate against the flu even though it mutates all the time, which is why it's like less effective, right? The polio vaccine was like goodbye polio, right?

And we haven't been able to say goodbye flu. Polio doesn't like to mutate all that much. But the flu mutates like it's its full-time job. You have the polio outbreak of 1916. And then you have the Spanish flu, which is the closest COVID parallel, especially because they wore masks and stuff. And this is a global pandemic from 1918 to 1920. And this fucking thing killed like 25 to 50 million people. And...

A lot of people. Yeah. This was during World War I, and the Spanish flu was as good at killing soldiers as mass charges against machine guns was. Like, World War I was like when we were really bad at understanding that you can't charge a machine gun, you know?

And so they'd be like, oh, just send more young poor people in front of that machine gun. That'll work. I think for actual soldiers, combat deaths edges out. I didn't write down the numbers, but they're in the running with each other. The thing that really scared people about the Spanish flu is that it was affecting healthier people than the flu usually did. And we didn't have the flu shot yet, but public health departments did their best. I think there's kind of this interesting thing where it's like,

People do try, you know, when you're like, oh, they did things wrong. And you're like, yeah, but they did things. They did what was what they thought they could, you know? Yeah. Going back to my friend who works in the health industry, he

They were trying to learn as much as they could about, in this case, COVID. But it was constantly changing. They were getting new data. It was moving so quickly. I can only imagine back in 1917 or 1913. 18, but yeah. Yeah, in that area. I have a script in front of me, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I memorized things. That wasn't, you didn't have ready access to,

Actually, that's kind of an interesting juxtaposition of like, in some cases, I think that Boone is having more access and maybe in other cases, it's kind of a detriment, which is what we're seeing today in terms of, you know, misinformation, disinformation. Oh, yeah, totally. But not that that didn't exist before, but...

Yeah, but she was saying that we were always trying to figure it out as quickly as we could to get solutions because there are also people who don't want their loved ones to die. I know. And it's like, oh, you said last week it was this. And you're like, yeah, you're aware that like the whole point of science is to change your mind as new information comes in, but then act on the best available information the entire time. Like that doesn't feel like a hard concept from my point of view, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, no, that makes total sense that you would get new information, take that in, and then make your informed opinion. And so in New York City, when the Spanish flu came, they basically built a social distancing infrastructure. They staggered business hours so that not everyone was on public transit at once. They got rid of rush hour in order to fight the flu. Oh, wow. I wish they would just do that anyway. What am I saying? I live in the mountains. I haven't had to deal with rush hour in like...

I don't remember how many years. Well, it's painful. Yeah, there's just no one around. When you have to wait for a tractor, that's the most annoying thing that I have to put up with. Hilarious. But then when you finally pass them, they're just like, oh, hey, how's it going? Give the wave. They also got theaters to sell only half their seats to people. So you have an empty seat next to you. And...

People started covering their mouths when coughing, which was a new technology at the time. Wow. I love this. See, I do the vampire cough. Yeah, we've moved from hands to the inner elbow. Bodies piled up unburied. And in 1918, 21,000 New York City children were orphaned. And that is the New York City that our main character of the week was born into. The one that his competitor would move to.

Jonas Salk was called a hero, and he seemed to kind of revel in that identity. There's a lot of arguments. This is a man that their hagiography is about. This is a man where they're like, either he's just a complete piece of garbage or almost everything you read about it is like, he's just basically the best. This is Jesus walking amongst us. Much like Jesus, he was Jewish.

He was hardworking as fuck and he tirelessly worked to make the world better. He also wasn't the only person doing this work. Oh, also, we'll get to this at the end. He was like a eugenicist and had really wild ideas and it was real sketchy.

Oh, that's a fun teaser. Yeah, his wife divorced him and for pretty solid reasons. And anyway, we'll get to that. Way to go, girl. Yeah. Oh, you're a eugenicist. I think I should get out of here. That was like, yeah, like, yeah.

And I think there were a lot of breakups around Trump's election. You know, I think that there was a lot of people who were like, oh, I could put up with my boyfriend until this is just the step too far. This is too real now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure. I met someone who would that basically happened to and I don't feel bad for him at all. I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry that you wait. No, never mind. Anyway, Jonas Salk wasn't the only person

doing this work around vaccines. And people have complained about him taking credit for more than his own work. And he started off his life as a leftist. He was actually investigated by the FBI for communist sympathies. Then he moved to apolitical, and he wound up writing mystical eugenicist shit about how scientists should control the human race genetically by introducing viruses into people's embryos. That's the big medical hero of the 20th century, Jonas Salk. But

What thing that Jonas Salk had access to? No, he didn't actually. He raised very poor. Well, I bet some of our products and services were actually affordable. Probably. Because some of them are just losing your life to... Anyway, here's some ads. I love all of them and have no complicated feelings about the nature of my work. Here they are.

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We're back and we're talking about Jonas Salk. Born with no middle name, but he's going to get one in an interesting way.

Can't wait. That's my teaser. And it's not like me just adding a eugenicist in quotes as the middle name or whatever. No, he actually gets an actual middle name. Jonas Salk was born on October 28th, 1914 in East Harlem in a tenement building. He was the first son of Dora and Daniel Salk. His mother was a Russian Jew from what's now Belarus. Her own parents had owned a tavern in Minsk. Dora came over to Manhattan with her family when she was 13. She was a

where she lived with others in the wildly overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side and worked in the garment industry, which was not known for good working conditions. And people who've listened to this show and or have much of a grasp know that the reason that Jews were leaving the Russian Empire is that the pogroms were real not nice. The family did fairly well for themselves, and Dora became a foreman,

At the, you know, tenement, the sewing, garment industry, whatever. I don't know the name of the place she worked. And the family moved to East Harlem, where, like, more people had, like, actual homes, but were still kind of crowded into them. This is a, like, move from, like, poverty to lower middle class is the best I can tell. Okay. Jonas's dad, Daniel, was a Lithuanian Jew who was born in the U.S. and a lace maker who designed women's neckwear.

He was quiet and humble. His mom was driven and loud. I have read so many biographies for this work where they just like really want to complain about overbearing moms to the point where I actually just question everything about the way the history is presented. Yeah. I think the history of the overbearing mom, I always question it. Every time I see it, I'm like. Yeah. In this case, Jonas likes his mom.

and appreciates that she was a taskmaster. Okay, okay. When they wound up with Jonas, their eldest kid, mom was very active in directing his education and making sure he started reading right away and shit. She became a stay-at-home mom and was apparently kind of domineering. Our boy Jonas skipped a bunch of grades, was very quiet, ignored sports, and read books. He wasn't a very happy kid. His mother treated him like an adult pretty much right away.

But he never blamed anything on his mother and said that he inherited her work ethic and is very grateful for it. And it is important to this story that he is a Jewish kid, the child of an immigrant. His Judaism is important to his work. He's not necessarily like super observant near the end of his life. As a kid, he is. But the like cultural and sort of theological underpinnings remain important to him, I believe, his entire life. He consciously accepts the Jewish obligation of tikkun olam, which is repairing the world.

You have an obligation to make the world a better place, which is, I think, cool as hell. Although, obviously, people can interpret that to mean I want to inject viruses into children to make them have different, you know, genetic structures. But,

First, he just saves millions of lives. At this level, yeah. And he doesn't do any of the philosophical stuff he dreams of later. So the thing he practically does. It's just a dream he has in his head. I went back and forth like four times already. I had a moment where I was like, do I have to just scrap this and start linking? And I'm like, he's just actually complicated and overall not looking great. But he's still interesting. Yeah.

Early on, he decides that he wants to work relieving the suffering of the sick and the injured. And there's so much myth-making about this guy. And there's things you'll read where he's like, he saw the 1916 and 1918 pandemics. And I'm like, no, he didn't. He was like three years old. He did, though, grow up in the wake of those crises. And he absolutely grew up knowing people who were paralyzed and dealing with a lot of disability as a result of polio.

When he was 12, he went to an all-boys prep school for City College. This school is free, but it's incredibly hard to get into, which means that it's mostly the children of immigrants who go there, and especially Jewish immigrants based on the demographics of New York at the time. I grew up so outside of this concept. This place is as preppy. I didn't understand what a prep school was. This place is as preppy as a prep school can prep. Their school newspaper is in Latin.

Oh, okay. Yeah. It is more of a humanities school than a STEM school. And once he was there, he did not stand out. He was class secretary, but not class president. The only thing that stood out about him was that he was a sharp dresser. He was quiet and dedicated and figured he'd become a lawyer or a politician to make the world better. Once again, politicians famously always making the world better. Definitely. Yeah.

Also, just like, I guess I'll just be a lawyer or a politician. Yeah, whatever makes the world better. One of those things. I don't know. Yes. He was a prep school nerd. He was in the current history society and he was in the law and debate society. Oh, wow. The law and debate society is one society. So that sounds extra miserable.

That sounds really intense. Yeah. Law and debate. Yeah. Not just debate. Yeah. We must have the law. Whoever wins the debate gets to tell everyone who lives and dies. It's going to be totally normal. Yeah, definitely. He was the advertising manager for the yearbook and assistant business manager of the school paper. You get a picture of this guy. You're just like, he doesn't have a lot of friends. Like no one hates him. He's just there, you know? Yeah. He was doing a lot. We must say. He was. You want to guess what year he started college?

No, please don't make me. He was 15 years old when he started college because of course he fucking was. Oh, gosh. He went to City College, which is what it was a prep school for that he went to. And City College was prestigious and free. And it was also 80% Jewish because it was the place that immigrant kids can go to.

He barely made any friends. He was going to do pre-law, but then his mom was like, nah, you'd be terrible as a lawyer. You can't even beat me in an argument. How? Because he's not very like assertive, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So he went into pre-med and then his mom was like, nah, you're too weak to be a doctor. You should be a teacher. Mom sounds fun. And he stood up for himself again, he's myth-making, against his overbearing mom, who he actually loved.

He was like, no, I like medicine. He doesn't have a wife to blame at this point. I know, but he will have a wife to blame soon. Don't worry. Yeah. Yeah. Give it time. Men like this always have some woman where like it was her. Yeah. Absolutely. He was like, I'm going to do medicine, but I don't want to be a doctor. I want to do medical science. He had read a book about Louis Pasteur, the guy who did one vaccine or whatever. And he was like, all right, vaccines and shit. That's my fucking thing.

The problem with this, there's this free school and it's full of Jewish immigrant kids, is that higher education was anti-Semitic and had informal caps on the number of Jewish kids admitted. So it was very hard for the city college kids to get into higher schools, like once they finished their undergrad. This entire establishment was built and funded to help the children of immigrants, but there's like a serious glass ceiling put into place by WASP America.

So Jonas Salk applied everywhere and every place rejected him except one. We went to what's now called the New York University College of Medicine. His interest was in medical research. And so people were like, just get a PhD instead of an MD. And he was like, no, I'm going to be a doctor, just a research doctor. And in this new school, he was entirely unremarkable and forgettable. He barely made any friends. He lived at home with his overbearing mom. Sorry. Anyway. Anyway.

He had to find work to pay for school, so he started working in research. And he was good at medical research right away. If you are interested in animal rights, this man is not a hero. One of the many maybe categories we can say. Yeah, and that one's like a style at the time thing. And like animal testing is a complicated subject that I don't want to get into the morality of. Anyway, whatever.

He starts working in research and he is good at this shit right away. His second research project was to cultivate scarlet fever or rather the bacteria that causes it and give rabbits scarlet fever. He improved the process of cultivating bacteria, speeding it up by a factor of seven and got his first paper published in an academic journal when he was 22. So this is like kind of the first time he's like really like standing out, you know? Yeah.

his overbearing mom yeah we're all doing air quotes this whole time i think everyone can hear it in our voices i hope you can hear the air quotes has been like you're not good at this you're not good at this he's been a part of all these organizations and now has something that he feels good at yeah it's really painting a picture of somebody who was trying a bunch of things

And looking for the one thing that like they would really excel at. Yeah, totally. He's good at this stuff. He might not be as groundbreaking as people later paint him, but he is genuinely good at this stuff. And when he gets interested in vaccines, there are a few bacterial vaccines and a few viral vaccines around. And bacterial vaccines can be made using dead bacteria.

But viral vaccines at the time, like for smallpox, rabies, and yellow fever, they had to be made out of weakened but live viruses. So you isolate a virus, you beat it up, tell it that it's no good, never going to amount to anything, and then you inject that into someone. And this is seen as an axiom. Viral infections can only be vaccinated against by live viruses.

And live virus vaccines are inherently a bit riskier. People still use them. And actually, it's going to be a live virus that's going to actually get rid of polio. Live vaccines are more likely to provide lifelong immunity. You and everyone listening to this has likely had both. And if you haven't, then get mad at your parents for not vaccinating you and go get vaccinated. But live vaccines are not always appropriate. The flu shot we use now is an inactive vaccine. It's a dead virus vaccine.

And Jonas Salk is part of why we get the flu shot. He was working for a virologist named Thomas Francis Jr., who was the first man to isolate the flu virus and later who developed the flu shot or led the research team that developed the flu shot. There's a lot of, I mean, no one's like writing hagiographies about him, but you know, he's part of a team.

Thomas had Jonas try to stimulate antibodies in mice with that flu virus. The basic idea of vaccines, which people probably know, but in case you don't, they either contain antibodies to a viral or bacterial infection, or they convince your body to make its own antibodies, which is even better. So Jonas is working to stimulate antibodies in mice with dead flu viruses, like a normal person who has normal hobbies.

I'm actually grateful he did this. I'm not complaining. Meanwhile, he fell for a woman named Donna Lindsay, who was an inch taller than him and from a rich family and was pursuing her master's in social work. At this point, they're both leftists and they shared a desire to make the world better. This does not sound like a really great romance. He was completely smitten with her and she was like, I don't know.

And I've read it described in multiple places as he basically kind of wore her down until she was like, fine, I'll marry you. Yeah. She was like, I don't need you. I'm good. But he. Yeah. He persisted. Which means that she's going to have to like give up her career and like raise their kids. And like it was a, you know, it was early 20th century.

It was like the type of romances that we still unfortunately sometimes paint romantically, but at the time was very romantic of just a man being like, I got her eventually. I wore her down. She saw how smart I was. I'm not a nerd. Yeah, totally. And he's like, she's so beautiful. And she's always like, eh, he's all right. I don't know. Yeah.

He graduated on June 8th, 1939. And he and Donna got married on June 9th, 1939, the very next day. And the reason it happened in this order is that she's from this like wealthy Jewish family. And his parents don't like that her family isn't really practicing Jewish. But her family doesn't like that his family is poor.

Donna's dad is already pretty mad that his daughter is marrying below her station. So he insisted that it be done after he graduated so that the announcement could say Jonas Edward Salk, MD. And you might be thinking to yourself, but doesn't he not have a middle name? Well, Donna's dad was mad that Jonas didn't have a middle name, had not been properly anglicized. So he insisted that Jonas take Edward as a middle name.

So he gets his middle name from his father-in-law, who's like, you are an Edward. Wow. There's also something to be said about, you know what? The day after you graduate, we're just going to take out all the air out of what you did. Yeah. And put it here. Totally. Totally. Yeah, that was a real move. Okay. So he's married now. And I think he moves out of the house.

He has a two-year internship at a research hospital, and he wanted to keep doing virology. But he was Jewish, and he wasn't from an Ivy League, so he kept getting turned down everywhere. Until his former supervisor, Thomas Franzen Jr., the guy who had him testing dead viruses on mice, brought him out to Ann Arbor, Michigan to keep working on influenza. Eventually, Donna's going to be like, you can't just fucking drag me all over the country for your shitty fucking research and then ignore me all the time. But that hasn't happened yet. And he, like, never talked about

or their relationship. Like, it'd be a shock to know. Anyway, they're out in Ann Arbor. Thomas Francis Jr. and some others had developed a vaccine ready for human trials for the first time for the flu shot. And the lab rats that they were going to use for this were patients at state hospitals for people with severe mental illnesses who were not in any way able to provide meaningful consent. Yeah. Love that. History is a nightmare land. Yes, it is.

Okay. Jonas Salk spoke at the end of his life about the importance of taking calculated risks in order to advance science. He seemed to genuinely consider the human costs of those risks, but he sure took a lot of them. He oversaw 8,000 patients who got the vaccine or a placebo. Antibodies went up, but there was no flu that season, so they couldn't really prove anything. So they were like, ah, the problem is that none of these people got the flu.

Option A. Oh, no. Wait a year. Option B. Take infected mouse lung tissue and spray it into people's noses who are not able to consent because they have severe mental illnesses and are wards of the state. He goes for option B. Yep. That's what I was afraid of. Yeah.

This kind of thing did not fall out of style until the Nuremberg trials of 1947, when people were like, maybe there should be ethical standards for testing on people. Yeah, maybe. There's a lot of stuff that the Nazis did that was kind of just what everyone in the West was doing, but cranked up like three notches, you know? Yeah. And it made everyone be like, oh, yeah.

Were we doing that? Let's really go for it. Yeah. If we're going to do it, let's just go. Yeah. And made everybody else be like, yeah. Yeah. You'd think they'd be like, maybe this eugenics thing is no good. But it actually took decades before the West got over their obsession with eugenics. Some people, like Salk, died obsessed with it. I don't know if he defined what he did as eugenics. I couldn't actually find the answer to that. But we'll talk about that later.

This worked, the flu shots and the giving people the flu without their permission. The control group got the flu at about 50%, while the vaccinated folks got it at 16%. So it was very effective at stopping the flu that year. In 1943, they got to show the world that they'd done good as a flu epidemic spread. 12,500 soldiers were put into a trial. No need to spray infected mouse lungs into their noses because there's actually a flu this year.

And only 2% of the inoculated folks got sick. And the mental patients who'd been tested on the year before were still immune. So dead viruses can work. And that's where we're going to leave it today. Our hero is doing great things. It's just messy. This is just like he's not in any way acting abnormally to what he does for work at this point. And that's just an indictment of people refusing to think about ethics.

Wow. Well, I'm very eager to see the downfall of this hero. Oh, that doesn't happen. Are the complexities of the downfall? No. No, he dies a hero. Ah, okay. I started researching him because people painted a real pretty picture of him and I was like, he's who I'm going to cover. Because you can paint a real pretty picture of this man. And like...

Maybe this is just like a no heroes moment, right? Where you're like, well, whoever does this kind of work is going to have a willingness to hurt people, to help people in a way that is like morally messy. I still kind of come down on this particular guy. Not so great in the end. I think taking in the complexities of anybody is good. Yeah. And then like science weighing the information you get.

And forming your opinion. Ah, all right. Well, instead of telling the listener what to think about this man, you mean I should just continue to explain the story and then interesting. Although I didn't name this cool people did cool stuff. So I always feel like I got to kind of specifically be like, this man is not worthy of the title. But the thing that happened, the creation of a polio vaccine is

Yeah. Well, that's also complicated. You know, this show is just called cool stuff. Yeah, totally. It's just cool stuff. Well, if people are like, but I want to hear you, Annie Reese on the podcast more, but I don't want to wait till Wednesday. What can they do? Well, you can find me on stuff. I've never told you or savor.com.

Wherever you get your podcast. And I'm out and about, but not really. Yeah, fair enough. I don't even know why I said that. But yes, you can find me there. I finally posted on Instagram like yesterday being like, I'm not checking DMs on here anymore. I am so tired of Meta, the company. Yeah, pretty much. That's where I am. I am still on Blue Sky. You can find me there. I'm on Substack. Find me there.

And podcasts. And also, what podcast did I listen to this week that I was like, I can't wait to plug this one on air. Now I don't remember what it was. I don't know. Sorry. It was probably 16th Minute, but I don't even remember what the most recent 16th Minute was. It's about the Hawk Tua SEC scandal. Oh, I mean, I did listen to that, but...

I was like, that doesn't seem like something you'd be like, wow, wow, wow about. Really great episode, by the way. You should listen to it. It is a good episode. Yeah, and it was a good update to it. I don't know. But like financial scandal? Not really your... Yeah. What was the most recent hood politics? Maybe it was that.

Politics is a great show. Yeah. Well, listen to Hood Politics with Prop and 16th Minute and everything else from Cool Zone Media and everything else that Annie Rees does and listen to all of it before Wednesday because I will be quizzing you. Yeah. All right. Bye, everyone. Bye.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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