I’m sure you’ve heard all about it. The story goes like this: an unvaccinated 20-year-old young man was hospitalized in June in Rockland County, New York with what was initially diagnosed as acute flaccid myelitis (a differential diagnosis for polio that emerged after the vaccine changed the strictness of criteria of polio diagnosis, ie. detection of polio virus), but further testing revealed a vaccine strain of poliovirus.

Since the man had just returned from Hungary and Poland, it’s reasonable to assume he got the vaccine strain of polio in either of those countries, as they still use the oral polio vaccine which contains a weakened–but “live”–virus that is capable of mutating and infecting others. It’s the reason we don’t use the vaccine routinely anymore in developed nations (for some reason it’s still ok to use in developing nations).

Then they’ll say: Go get vaccinated.

But the story of polio deserves more unpacking.

Rush to get vaccinated?

When teen heartthrob Elvis Presley agreed to get the polio vaccine on The Ed Sullivan Show in October, 1956, to boost public confidence and encourage millions of teens to take the polio vaccine; a strategy put together by the New York Health Commissioner, he was most likely already immune to the virus.

But vaccine strategists needed someone with Elvis’ reputation to reach teenagers. The vaccine had been out since April 1955, but after a brief pause in May of that year after a quality control debacle at Cutter Laboratories, dubbed The Cutter Incident which caused 40,000 healthy children to develop non-paralytic polio, and another 200 persons were paralyzed and 10 children and adults died, the vaccines were getting cold on the shelf. Elvis was just the kind of magic they needed to compel youth to take the shot.

Here’s the irony: Born in 1935 in a poor part of Mississippi, and now being 21 years old, Elvis would already have immunity to poliovirus, which subclinically infected almost every child by the time they were four years old. The more unsanitary the living conditions the more likely a child would have immunity from the enterovirus that spreads via the fecal-oral route.

But here’s something you may not know: giving injections while poliovirus is in circulation can actually result in more paralysis.

It’s one reason why the incidence of poliomyelitis parallels the use of syringes in the 1940s and 1950s. After the polio vaccine came out (which of course was another injection) the diagnostic criteria for polio had to change dramatically to visually ‘reduce the incidence of polio.’

I’ll get to that in a minute, but first you should know a few things about polio to understand the whole situation. It was true back in the 1950s, and it’s still true today: if you see one case of paralytic polio, then hundreds of people already have the virus replicating in their guts, and importantly, most of them will never even notice it–up to 90% of polio infections are completely asymptomatic.

Another 5% of people may have minor symptoms such as fever, muscle weakness, headache, nausea, and vomiting. Paralysis of any kind, temporary etc, occurs in about 5 per 1,000 cases. It’s rare, and may even be a mistaken course of the virus, initiated by some external factor like muscle trauma, aka. intramuscular injections. So, the last thing you want to do during an outbreak of actual poliovirus is pierce a needle through your muscle.

Provocation Polio A Major Cause of Paralytic Polio

When penicillin injections were made available to the public in 1944 and the diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus (DPT) vaccine in 1948, doctors never imagined they might cause paralytic polio, or poliomyelitis, in their young patients.

But by the 1950s, it became apparent there was a relationship between the site of injection and the subsequent onset of paralysis. So much so, physicians in New York, United Kingdom and Australia cautioned administering vaccinations during the polio season.

Other doctors saw the same phenomenon with tonsillectomies, as they discovered that children who got their tonsils removed had a much higher rate of bulbar polio, than a child who did not have the surgery. Bulbar polio is the most deadly form of poliomyelitis, as it involves paralysis of the lungs and requires the use of the iron lung to keep the patient alive. Bulbar polio has the highest mortality rate of all poliomyelitis.

How many cases of the 1940s and 1950s polio epidemic were directly caused by the medical care? We may never know.

But there had never been any epidemics of polio prior to the 1940s and 1950s, when intramuscular injections and tonsillectomies were suddenly very commonplace and routine. The only other anomalous polio epidemic of 1916 most likely was the result of a lab leak, according to researcher H.V.Wyatt who wrote several research articles on the subject.

It’s important to remember in the 1940s and 1950s all syringes and needles were reused–not single use or disposable–with minimal sterilizing between patients.

How Intramuscular Injections Cause Paralytic Polio

One often unappreciated aspect to the polio timeline is that it was never an epidemic virus prior to the 1900s. And it was never associated with large clusters of paralyzed children until the late 1940s and 1950s.

Why is that?

For one, in order for the virus to accidentally invade the motor neurons (it’s regular place of replication is the gut hence why it’s an enterovirus) it needs a muscle injury or muscle trauma.

For two, not every case of paralysis back then was actually caused by just one virus: poliovirus. The virus was named after the condition, poliomyelitis, and after the vaccine came out in 1955, all these other paralytic conditions broke off from the polio diagnosis and became their own condition: Guillain Barre syndrome, transverse myelitis, acute flaccid myelitis, aseptic meningitis, etc.

Today, research has found that the unexpected, accidental occurrence of the virus invading the central nervous system (CNS) may have to do with muscle trauma:

Thus, the infamous propensity of poliovirus to invade the central nervous system and specifically target motor neurons is rare and accidental and it is neither a prerequisite nor does it present a benefit for its normal life cycle in humans. Poliovirus is a neurotropic virus by mistake; its CNS invasion is mostly a chance event and largely independent of the age, gender, or socioeconomic position of the infected person.

The association between muscle trauma during viremic phase of poliovirus infection long documented since the earliest epidemics (falls, strenuous activity, intramuscular injections):

It seems that by an unknown mechanism, muscle injury appears to open a portal, possibly at the neuromuscular junction, to allow poliovirus to enter the presynaptic motor neuron terminal. 

Another study found that needle pricks increased virus load:

“In mice that received needle sticks, the brain contained an average of 6.4 pool members, 3-fold more virus than untreated mice, suggesting that muscle damage increased poliovirus transport to the CNS.”

Polio’s most “famous survivor” former President Franklin D. Roosevelt who created the March of Dimes which ultimately funded the first vaccine, had a remarkably physically strenuous day right before he ‘came down’ with polio, back then called infantile paralysis:

In August 1921, Roosevelt, then 39, joined his family at their summer cottage on Campobello Island off the coast of Maine and took their 24′ sailboat out on the water with several of his sons. While out, they spotted a forest fire on a nearby island and extinguished it. Returning to the cottage he ran with the children across the island to swim in Lake Glen Severn, followed by a dip in the icy waters of the Bay of Fundy. That night he was too tired to even dress, and went to bed without supper. The next morning he was running a high fever and developed symmetric, ascending paralysis. He would never walk again, without assistance.

More recently, it’s proposed that FDR didn’t have polio after all, and instead had Guillain Barre syndrome, evidence that many paralytic diseases were misdiagnosed during the ‘polio era.’ One clue may be the fact that he had symmetrical paralysis, whereas poliomyelitis is more often characterized as asymmetrical. His age is also much older than most infantile paralysis patients.

Polio Today

Today, many countries are still struggling with vaccine-induced paralysis.

In India, rates of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis have skyrocketed and correlates with the “pulse polio” vaccine campaigns.

In Romania, the rate of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis is for unexplained reasons 5 to 17 times higher than in other countries. 

In the United States, we have a new enterovirus EV-D68 causing polio-like paralysis, but today we call it acute flaccid myelitis. But it’s still essentially poliomyelitis which always had multiple viral triggers.

In 2016, a 6-year-old boy named Jonathan Daniel Ramirez Porter from Bellingham, Washington died of what ended up being diagnosed as encephalitis, which he developed just 17 days after getting his back to school vaccines which included several vaccines and a flu shot. At first he was included in a group of suspected acute flaccid myelitis cases that were clustered in the Washington area at the time.

We can give millions and millions of injections, but we’re never away from dis-ease. It doesn’t appear to be the tool to get us to a completely “disease free” state.

You can go ahead and do your own VAERS search or look at the Vaccine Injury page here to see the collateral damage. Mass vaccination so far leads us to “re-name” diseases, conditions, and pushes mutations on new viruses or other strains to fill in the gaps. We will never eradicate microorganisms nor should we be trying to.

To learn more about polio, please see these posts:

The Science is Unsettling: What About Polio?

The Cutter Incident