An infection that can disable and kill stalks the land, but a brand-new vaccine offers hope that almost everyone, kids included, can evade it. After scientific testing, a nationwide rollout of the vaccine begins.
Sound familiar?
As the U.S. government gears up to offer COVID-19 shots to about 28 million 5- to 11-year-olds, high levels of vaccine hesitancy in some corners may make the campaign a tough sell.
But it's not the first time a nationwide effort has sought to shield American kids from a dire infectious health threat, and history offers a successful how-to.
Back in the mid-1950s, polio stalked the United States every summer, with random outbreaks occurring in one community or the next.
The killed-virus polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk was seen as a godsend, and in 1954, frantic parents volunteered more than 1.8 million children to serve as test subjects in a yearlong field trial of the vaccine's effectiveness.
Of those kids, 600,000 would be randomly injected with three doses of the experimental polio vaccine or a placebo.
The picture contrasts starkly with today, with a large number of parents hesitating to inoculate either themselves or their children with COVID-19 vaccines that have been safely administered to more than 221 million people in the United States and nearly 3.9 billion worldwide.
"That's a really sad thing that we've gotten to in this society, that people have gotten to that level of mistrust around government and the medical field in general," said Dr. Peter Salk, Jonas Salk's son and president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation.
Cutting-edge technology
Today's COVID-19 vaccines were developed at breakneck pace, with drug companies handed billions in government funding, using cutting-edge technology to craft the jabs and then test them in streamlined clinical trials.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week approved a reduced-dose COVID vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds based on a clinical trial involving about 4,700 kids. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to consider the pediatric COVID vaccine this week.
"With advances in modern science and technology, we're able to get to some of these solutions much more quickly," said Stacey Stewart, president and CEO of the March of Dimes. "Clinical trials are done very differently today that still get us to the same place, being able to validate safety and efficacy of vaccines."
By contrast, polio had been a perennial and petrifying threat for decades by the time Jonas Salk had his vaccine ready for widespread testing.
"These epidemics had been going on for years and people were terrified," his son said. "There was no way of knowing when an epidemic was going to strike near you, if it was going to hit your child or someone else's child."
There was "total fear," Peter Salk said.
"And when kids were infected, they could end up paralyzed for life," he said. "They could end up in an iron lung for either a short period of time until their breathing muscles recovered or for the rest of their lives, or they could die."
Once the Salk vaccine had been proven safe in early trials involving 5,320 people -- including Salk himself, his wife and three sons -- the drums began beating hard for a massive clinical trial to test its effectiveness.
The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis -- forerunner of the March of Dimes -- spent $7.5 million in private donations to initiate, organize and run the vaccine trial, with little participation from the federal government. That's more than $76 million in today's dollars.
There was enormous pressure to get the trial done as quickly as possible, ahead of the next polio season.
Between April 26 and July 10, 1954, volunteers distributed Salk's series of three polio shots. In all, more than 443,000 children received at least one polio inoculation, while more than 210,000 received a placebo, according to the March of Dimes.
Researchers spent the rest of 1954 following all the children, and taking blood samples from 40,000 to examine their antibody response.
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