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SMNTY Classics: How We Beat Polio But Not the Mythmaking Around Jonas Salk (Part 2) · Stuff Mom Never Told You

0:05
Speaker 1: Hey, this is Annie and Samantha. I hope my stuff.
0:07
Speaker 1: I never told you production of iHeartRadio. So we are
0:19
Speaker 1: back with part two of when I guested on the
0:23
Speaker 1: show Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff with markat Kiljoy,
0:27
Speaker 1: a friend of the show. Love having her on, and
0:31
Speaker 1: this was my first time. As I mentioned in the
0:34
Speaker 1: previous one, I kind of warmed up in the second part.
0:37
Speaker 1: I think because I was nervous. We get nervous listeners,
0:41
Speaker 1: We really do all the time. Yeah, if we work
0:45
Speaker 1: with really cool people, it's hard sometimes. This two parter
0:50
Speaker 1: was about vaccines, and I maintain that that is a
0:54
Speaker 1: very important thing. There's a lot going on with them
0:57
Speaker 1: right now that we should be talking, talking about and
1:00
Speaker 1: paying attention to. So please enjoy this episode.
1:08
Speaker 2: Cool Zone Media.
1:11
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to the show that you already know
1:14
Speaker 3: the name of the title of because you clicked on it.
1:17
Speaker 3: I'm your host, Marto Kiljoy, and I have a guest,
1:20
Speaker 3: and my guest is Annie Reese.
1:22
Speaker 2: Hey.
1:22
Speaker 1: Anny Reese, Yes, Hello, I'm so happy to be here,
1:26
Speaker 1: happy to be back.
1:28
Speaker 3: Thanks on this day that's totally a different day than
1:30
Speaker 3: the previous day. Definitely, Yeah, because this is live, people
1:34
Speaker 3: don't know that because it's not true. But Annie Reese
1:38
Speaker 3: is a podcaster and is the host of Saver, a
1:42
Speaker 3: food podcast. Although now you know that it actually isn't
1:45
Speaker 3: a different day. If it was two days from now,
1:46
Speaker 3: I would have now listened to savor Ye because it
1:49
Speaker 3: sounds really up my alley. But I didn't because actually
1:53
Speaker 3: we only recorded part one about five minutes ago.
1:55
Speaker 1: So you're revealing how the sausage gets made. I know, terrible.
2:00
Speaker 3: It's really just giving them all the secrets. It's okay,
2:03
Speaker 3: like the fact we have a secret producer who I've
2:06
Speaker 3: never introduced before, never, Sophie Lichterman.
2:10
Speaker 1: Hehy are you Sophie. I'm all right.
2:14
Speaker 4: I lost my voice last week, so it's like slightly
2:16
Speaker 4: scratchy still.
2:18
Speaker 3: Any particular reason or just for fun.
2:20
Speaker 4: I just was like, man, I don't need it anymore.
2:22
Speaker 4: As fine, Yeah, you don't, like you don't work in audio,
2:26
Speaker 4: so I was like, fuck it, I don't need that thing.
2:30
Speaker 2: You know.
2:30
Speaker 3: It's like now these days, you get a cold and
2:32
Speaker 3: then your voice is like slightly different for several months. Yeah,
2:36
Speaker 3: and I have a bunch of audio books I have
2:37
Speaker 3: to record, and then I keep being like, oh, I'm
2:39
Speaker 3: gonna put it off until my voice gets back to normal,
2:41
Speaker 3: and then I'm like, I don't know what normal is anymore.
2:44
Speaker 1: And recording an audiobook, I've only done one, but it's
2:47
Speaker 1: a whole thing. It's annoying, it is, and it's like,
2:53
Speaker 1: why don't you just for five hours not mispronounce anything?
2:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, because every time you do, you have to click
3:00
Speaker 3: on your computer and go back.
3:03
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then you're reading the stuff you've written, and
3:06
Speaker 1: you're like, maybe I should have I wish I had
3:10
Speaker 1: known I had to read this aloud.
3:12
Speaker 3: You know, but this is revealing more information about you
3:16
Speaker 3: than I previously knew. Oh no, what was the book
3:19
Speaker 3: that you read?
3:21
Speaker 1: Well? Stuff I've never told you has a book?
3:25
Speaker 3: And do you do the audiobook?
3:27
Speaker 1: Yes, we did so Samantha McVeigh, who has been a
3:30
Speaker 1: guest on the show before. She is my wondrous co
3:34
Speaker 1: host and a great friend of mine. We read it together,
3:38
Speaker 1: but foolishly we didn't realize we were going to have
3:42
Speaker 1: to do the audiobook, and so we were sitting there
3:46
Speaker 1: next to each other just bewildered, like, oh gosh, I
3:50
Speaker 1: would not have written this if I had known. But
3:53
Speaker 1: she was a great support throughout the whole thing. So
3:58
Speaker 1: shout out to having supporter friends who help you get
4:02
Speaker 1: through something like reading an audiobook for five hours that
4:06
Speaker 1: can be very intense. Yeah.
4:08
Speaker 3: I always do that alone in a closet, So like,
4:11
Speaker 3: that's pretty good.
4:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, the subject matter was a little deep, so I
4:14
Speaker 1: was like, this is yeah, yeah, yeah, but check it out.
4:19
Speaker 1: It's good.
4:21
Speaker 3: Well. Also, we have an audio engineer named Eva.
4:26
Speaker 1: Hi Eva hi Eva hi Eva.
4:29
Speaker 3: And our theme music was written for us Beyond Woman,
4:31
Speaker 3: and this is part two about well, it's gonna be
4:34
Speaker 3: a lot of parts about the things that the government's
4:36
Speaker 3: trying to take away from us. And this was going
4:38
Speaker 3: to be a glorious episode about how purely amazing the
4:41
Speaker 3: polio vaccine is. And then it got more interesting and
4:43
Speaker 3: fun when I found out that the person who gets
4:47
Speaker 3: called the destroyer of polio was not that, but was
4:50
Speaker 3: interesting and strange. And so we are telling the story
4:55
Speaker 3: of Jonas Salk, the man who was part of a
4:59
Speaker 3: large project and then gets whatever you've already heard me
5:02
Speaker 3: complain about this. So he has just started to do
5:07
Speaker 3: some flu vaccine stuff. He's not actually the one who
5:10
Speaker 3: you know, he's not in charge of this project, but
5:12
Speaker 3: he's part of it, and students at the university start
5:16
Speaker 3: getting vaccinated too, and so fewer of them were getting sick.
5:21
Speaker 3: Soon after that, they started studying how to put multiple
5:24
Speaker 3: strains of flu into the one vaccine. But there's a
5:27
Speaker 3: problem with this, right, If you put a whole lot
5:29
Speaker 3: of different flu into a vaccine, it starts being like, well,
5:33
Speaker 3: that's a lot of stuff in one shot, right, And
5:37
Speaker 3: people started experimenting with what are called adjuvants, which is
5:41
Speaker 3: what you can add to boost a vaccine's immunological response
5:44
Speaker 3: without upping the viral load. It's basically stuff that's like magnifying.
5:48
Speaker 3: It feels like a video game to me, where you're like, oh,
5:50
Speaker 3: if you have this thing, it like works really well
5:52
Speaker 3: with this other thing, and it like boosts the thing, you.
5:54
Speaker 1: Know, Yeah, kind of like D and D. Yeah you
5:57
Speaker 1: can get exactly.
5:59
Speaker 3: Yes. I would argue that anyone who's played D and
6:03
Speaker 3: D who's anti vax didn't play D and D. I
6:06
Speaker 3: cannot imagine being like, you want a plus one shield
6:09
Speaker 3: and you're like, oh no, it doesn't make you completely
6:12
Speaker 3: safe forever, So I don't want a plus one shield,
6:14
Speaker 3: And you're like, who are you? Why are you playing
6:17
Speaker 3: dungeons and dragons.
6:19
Speaker 1: I just feel like I need more of the science.
6:22
Speaker 1: I need to do my own research, and I'm just
6:24
Speaker 1: going to run into this battle without I don't need that.
6:28
Speaker 1: I don't.
6:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally.
6:29
Speaker 1: Yeah.
6:30
Speaker 3: You're like, all right, you went up a level. Do
6:31
Speaker 3: you want all the new powers that come with the
6:32
Speaker 3: upper level. I'm like, uh, that's like the way that
6:35
Speaker 3: the man wanted the dungeon master told me to do that.
6:38
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't trust that person.
6:40
Speaker 1: I don't trust that at all.
6:41
Speaker 2: All.
6:42
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, when you read about Sulk, you read about
6:47
Speaker 3: how people loved him, but scientists hated him. And if
6:51
Speaker 3: you read something a bit more of one of these
6:54
Speaker 3: hagiographies as most writing about him, is the reason that
6:58
Speaker 3: scientists hated him is they he bucked the trends. He
7:02
Speaker 3: was a maverick who refused to play by the rules
7:05
Speaker 3: or whatever. If you read more critical writing about him,
7:09
Speaker 3: is that he was attention seeking, risk taking idea, taking
7:13
Speaker 3: credit for ing, and kind of mercenary and reckless about
7:20
Speaker 3: that mercenary part of it. He pissed off his colleagues
7:23
Speaker 3: a lot while they're working on the flu shot because
7:26
Speaker 3: he made a deal with a pharmaceutical company Park Davison
7:30
Speaker 3: Company to give them exclusive vaccine information in exchange for
7:34
Speaker 3: royalties for the sale of the vaccine. This pissed off Francis,
7:40
Speaker 3: the person heading up the project, and they I don't
7:43
Speaker 3: think they ever rekindle their friendship.
7:47
Speaker 1: The bridge burned, yeah sounds like yeah.
7:51
Speaker 3: I lose track of the number of bridges he burned.
7:53
Speaker 3: It might be that they reconnected with this particular person later,
7:56
Speaker 3: but I don't believe so. And it's presented as like
7:59
Speaker 3: after that, he just wanted to be more independent in
8:02
Speaker 3: his research, and I'm like, no, he probably got a
8:04
Speaker 3: run out for being a capitalist dickbag. He's like, I
8:08
Speaker 3: want to be more independent in my research. So he
8:10
Speaker 3: moved to Pittsburgh and became the director of the Virus
8:13
Speaker 3: Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh's Medical School. This
8:17
Speaker 3: is not a prestigious appointment. It is in a forty
8:21
Speaker 3: by forty foot basement that is sometimes used as a
8:24
Speaker 3: morgue when they need overflow morge space. Originally, he was
8:29
Speaker 3: just going to work on the flu and measles and
8:31
Speaker 3: the common cold, but he was recruited by an organization
8:35
Speaker 3: called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which is this
8:40
Speaker 3: massive nonprofit fundraising organization. This is basically the Like Polio Group.
8:46
Speaker 3: It was founded by FDR, the most famous polio victim
8:49
Speaker 3: in the world, and FDR put his weight behind it,
8:53
Speaker 3: and they ran a fundraising campaign which is actually still
8:56
Speaker 3: around called the March of Dimes. And this started when
9:01
Speaker 3: a bunch of Hollywood stars asked people to mail a
9:04
Speaker 3: dime to the White House, and that you know, the
9:07
Speaker 3: inherent thought of this, I mean, it's mostly the thing
9:09
Speaker 3: that the government should just do anyway, But the idea
9:12
Speaker 3: is that this would help pay for the cost of
9:14
Speaker 3: treatment for polio patients, which basically no one could afford.
9:17
Speaker 3: It was incredibly expensive to take care of a polio patient,
9:21
Speaker 3: and there's no health insurance really at this point, and
9:23
Speaker 3: like it's hard to imagine a war system than we
9:26
Speaker 3: currently have. But that's where they were this organization. I
9:30
Speaker 3: think eighty million people donated to this, which is like,
9:34
Speaker 3: I don't know what the population of the US it
9:36
Speaker 3: was in nineteen thirty whatever. I assume it's about eighty
9:40
Speaker 3: million people. I don't know.
9:43
Speaker 1: I also am stuck in my like modern brain where
9:46
Speaker 1: I'm like the cost of mailing a dime.
9:50
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, totally like that. I guess the equivalent would
9:56
Speaker 3: be like mailing a dollar now, which still kind of
9:58
Speaker 3: barely works out.
10:00
Speaker 1: Yeh. But hey, it sounds like a lot of people
10:02
Speaker 1: got into it. I know.
10:04
Speaker 3: Also, you're like not supposed to mail cash anymore. I
10:06
Speaker 3: wonder when that changed.
10:07
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting, okay.
10:11
Speaker 3: And so the president founded this organization, but the guy
10:15
Speaker 3: who ran this organization, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis,
10:21
Speaker 3: very specifically didn't want the government to be the one
10:24
Speaker 3: funding polio research because if the government funds medical research,
10:30
Speaker 3: communism wins.
10:32
Speaker 1: No, we can't have that. Let all those kids die,
10:39
Speaker 1: you know, you know, not communism though.
10:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And so it's about private fundraising, getting everyone
10:47
Speaker 3: to donate. There's a word for getting everyone in the
10:50
Speaker 3: country to donate to something. It's called taxes.
10:56
Speaker 1: Yep, yep.
10:58
Speaker 3: So sulk in the Pittsburgh research they're like, all right,
11:01
Speaker 3: we're gonna fucking do this. We're gonna cure polio, or rather,
11:04
Speaker 3: we're gonna stop polio. And there was a lot of
11:09
Speaker 3: work involved in this, and not just like try stuff
11:12
Speaker 3: out and see what works, but rather grunt labor of
11:16
Speaker 3: typing a ton of different strains of polio. There's three strains,
11:21
Speaker 3: and then within each strain there's just like a whole
11:23
Speaker 3: bunch of types that are little sub guys. Only two
11:27
Speaker 3: had been typed before, and it is long, slow, boring
11:31
Speaker 3: work that kills an incredible number of monkeys and has
11:33
Speaker 3: to be done incredibly attentively. So Sulk and his team
11:38
Speaker 3: started killing those monkeys. That's not the way I want
11:40
Speaker 3: to phrase it. They started doing that work. Crucially, they
11:44
Speaker 3: are building on the work of a lot of people
11:47
Speaker 3: before them, and the work that a lot of their
11:50
Speaker 3: peers at other research institutions are still doing. The old
11:54
Speaker 3: way of typing polio. The style at the time involved, Okay,
11:58
Speaker 3: you get a lab monkey and you give it inoculations
12:02
Speaker 3: of a known type and so then it has like
12:05
Speaker 3: the one polio antibodies, right, And then you extract the
12:09
Speaker 3: monkey's blood, you combine it with an unknown type of polio,
12:13
Speaker 3: and then you inject it back into the brain of
12:15
Speaker 3: an uninfected monkey. If the monkey doesn't get sick, then
12:20
Speaker 3: the unknown type is similar to the type that the
12:22
Speaker 3: inoculated monkey at antibioties against, right, Because you're like, ah, well,
12:25
Speaker 3: it was protected against this, you know, right, folks, maybe Salk.
12:32
Speaker 3: I'm honestly suspicious of the shit I read that talks
12:34
Speaker 3: him up at this point and attributes various inventions to him.
12:38
Speaker 3: He figured out that you could use mineral oil to
12:41
Speaker 3: make a smaller amount of a virus cause a larger
12:43
Speaker 3: antibody response. That thing I talked about earlier that I
12:46
Speaker 3: forget the name of it, and it didn't write down
12:48
Speaker 3: on my script the word I'd never heard before and
12:49
Speaker 3: couldn't pronounce. By using mineral oil, Salk's team figured out
12:55
Speaker 3: that they could reduce the number of monkeys who had
12:57
Speaker 3: to die in order to isolate each type of polio. Previously,
13:01
Speaker 3: each type took forty monkeys. Now they can do it
13:05
Speaker 3: with only fifteen monkeys. That is a saving of twenty
13:08
Speaker 3: five monkeys. And if you want to save well, I
13:13
Speaker 3: guess it's not really time for an ad break, but
13:14
Speaker 3: that would have been so good. Just imagine the ads
13:19
Speaker 3: just do it early. Yeah, fuck it, here's the ads.
13:21
Speaker 3: Save some monkeys. Save your own monkeys by spending other
13:26
Speaker 3: monkeys lives on our goods and services. There you go,
13:30
Speaker 3: no rules here, but not a lot. Here they go,
13:39
Speaker 3: and we're back. So they're doing this work, and this
13:44
Speaker 3: is like the grunt labor of making a vaccine, because
13:47
Speaker 3: you just like have to isolate every single known type
13:51
Speaker 3: of polio. A man named Julius Jungner was on Salk's
13:56
Speaker 3: team and was responsible for a lot of the advancements
13:59
Speaker 3: that Sulk essentially took credit for. Julius had worked on
14:04
Speaker 3: the Manhattan Project, so he was familiar with his work
14:07
Speaker 3: having a seemingly positive end to some people and a
14:10
Speaker 3: great deal of complicated. And why I don't even see
14:13
Speaker 3: as complicated. It as bad that we dropped nukes on
14:15
Speaker 3: cities full of innocent people. But you know, whatever, I
14:19
Speaker 3: can imagine during World War Two being like, we better
14:21
Speaker 3: develop this before the Nazis do. I can see doing that, right,
14:25
Speaker 3: you know. He worked on that, and then he moved
14:29
Speaker 3: to the University of Pittsburgh and he developed a color
14:32
Speaker 3: test to determine how much virus is in tissue, and
14:36
Speaker 3: this made the whole thing go faster. He also figured
14:40
Speaker 3: out how to grow the virus in large quantities, which
14:43
Speaker 3: is more or less the thing that made the vaccine possible.
14:47
Speaker 3: As best as I can understand, most of the rest
14:50
Speaker 3: of what Sulk's team did was building on existing work
14:53
Speaker 3: and then just doing the work. Like people were like, oh,
14:55
Speaker 3: we got to a menapolio vaccine. These are the steps
14:58
Speaker 3: that are necessary, right because people had already done the
15:01
Speaker 3: how are we going to do this part? Except how
15:06
Speaker 3: are we going to get a ton of poliovirus? So
15:09
Speaker 3: Julius Jungner is the one who figures that out as
15:11
Speaker 3: far as they can tell, and because you need a
15:14
Speaker 3: ton of poliovirus if you want to inoculate the entire
15:17
Speaker 3: country and or the entire world. He kept running up
15:20
Speaker 3: against the scientific establishment like he would run up against
15:23
Speaker 3: the Committee on Typing, who kept saying that like, no,
15:26
Speaker 3: none of us want to change how we do things,
15:27
Speaker 3: and you need to stop being different, is the way
15:31
Speaker 3: it is often presented. Or they had legitimate reasons against
15:34
Speaker 3: the stuff that these people were doing, but people don't
15:37
Speaker 3: want to write about that because they want to write
15:38
Speaker 3: about a hero. Salkin's team kind of just did it
15:44
Speaker 3: anyway on the side, and to be fair, they were
15:48
Speaker 3: probably right in this particular circumstance. They typed seventy four
15:53
Speaker 3: strains of polio in a year in what was expected
15:56
Speaker 3: to take three years, and they seem to do it right.
16:02
Speaker 3: It wasn't like about shortcuts. It was about like finding
16:05
Speaker 3: better systems by which to do it. And the committee
16:08
Speaker 3: was like, all right, fine, you always all right, good enough.
16:13
Speaker 3: Twenty thousand monkeys died to type polio and you're making
16:18
Speaker 3: a face of the who seems.
16:24
Speaker 1: No, Oh my gosh, twenty thousand monkeys, it's terrible.
16:30
Speaker 2: Let me.
16:30
Speaker 1: I know, it's interesting hearing this story now because we've
16:36
Speaker 1: had so many developments since then, for good and for bad,
16:41
Speaker 1: and some of them have, you know, skewed us away
16:44
Speaker 1: from animal testing, but not always. But also I find
16:49
Speaker 1: this whole hero story of Sock really interesting because the
16:55
Speaker 1: parallels of what we're seeing now of the anti vax
16:58
Speaker 1: movement is very much. It feels in line with what
17:03
Speaker 1: he was all about, right, which is like no science
17:07
Speaker 1: establishment for me, I'm gonna do this. And so it's
17:11
Speaker 1: strange to have.
17:13
Speaker 3: These He's a move fast and brain things guy.
17:16
Speaker 1: But he was doing it four vaccines, and now we
17:20
Speaker 1: have it against vaccines.
17:23
Speaker 3: I know, as I'm writing this, I'm like, man, if
17:27
Speaker 3: RFK didn't hate this guy, he'd probably love this guy exactly, Like, yeah,
17:33
Speaker 3: it's a trip. So twenty thousand monkeys die, which is
17:38
Speaker 3: less than it would have been without some developments that
17:41
Speaker 3: they made. I don't know. I don't know to do
17:43
Speaker 3: math like that. I try not to. And there were
17:48
Speaker 3: and are three broad types of polio, types one, two,
17:51
Speaker 3: and three, which is fairly easy to remember how many
17:53
Speaker 3: there are. Type one is eighty percent of cases, and
17:58
Speaker 3: then types two and three are about ten percent of
18:00
Speaker 3: cases each. Type two is almost entirely benign, Type three
18:05
Speaker 3: is the deadliest, and type one is the typical paralytic
18:08
Speaker 3: one that we talked about. Fortunately for our researchers, there
18:14
Speaker 3: just wasn't a ton of variants in polo like influenza,
18:18
Speaker 3: so it was a very good candidate for vaccines. When
18:22
Speaker 3: people started growing polio on purpose, they grew it in
18:26
Speaker 3: the nervous systems of human fetuses, dead ones in the
18:28
Speaker 3: nineteen thirties. By nineteen forty nine, some folks in Boston
18:34
Speaker 3: managed to grow it onto other human tissue like skin
18:37
Speaker 3: and muscle and kidney, and that got other people the
18:41
Speaker 3: Nobel Prize in nineteen fifty four. People are like, how
18:44
Speaker 3: come Salk never got a Nobel Prize? But this is
18:47
Speaker 3: the only Nobel Prize for polio that happened is that
18:50
Speaker 3: people figure how to grow it on different tissue, and
18:54
Speaker 3: Sauk was like, all right, that's a good idea, and
18:57
Speaker 3: so he grew it in monkey tissue, a mix of
18:59
Speaker 3: ten's and kidneys. This might have been the part that
19:02
Speaker 3: was Yugner's idea. That's my combining two different sources to
19:06
Speaker 3: come of my own conjecture. Now they can bulk make polio,
19:11
Speaker 3: and they understand the types of polio, and so it's
19:14
Speaker 3: just time to start doing it. They pick the most
19:17
Speaker 3: antibody producing strains of each type of polio and not coincidentally,
19:21
Speaker 3: also the most dangerous, and then they use formaldehyde to
19:26
Speaker 3: quote unquote kill the virus. More technically, this inactivates the virus.
19:32
Speaker 3: Sulk was fantastically good at science communication. This is maybe
19:37
Speaker 3: the one thing you can't really take away from him.
19:39
Speaker 3: He was good at explaining ideas to a broad audience.
19:41
Speaker 3: Which is funny though, because then I read a whole
19:43
Speaker 3: bunch of excerpts of one of his later biophilosophy books,
19:46
Speaker 3: and I'm like, no, this is incredibly badly written. Like
19:50
Speaker 3: it is like comically badly written.
19:52
Speaker 1: You think people were just talking him up? Or was
19:54
Speaker 1: it like a thing of the time.
19:57
Speaker 3: I think he was good on camera, and his biophilosophy
19:59
Speaker 3: books are later he basically win, that's out right. He's
20:02
Speaker 3: like high on his own supply, and he's like, I
20:04
Speaker 3: can do whatever I want. I'm a biophilosopher now. And
20:06
Speaker 3: people are like, what is that? And he's like, let
20:07
Speaker 3: me tell you, and they're like, I wish I had
20:08
Speaker 3: never asked. I'm so sorry. He spent more and more
20:12
Speaker 3: time in the limelight, talking to newspapers and radio audiences
20:16
Speaker 3: and bringing photographers into the lab, which is no longer
20:19
Speaker 3: a forty by forty basement, it is several floors and
20:21
Speaker 3: thousands of square feet. June nineteen fifty two was the
20:26
Speaker 3: worst outbreak of polio and human history so far. I
20:29
Speaker 3: would have just said in human history. But you know,
20:32
Speaker 3: we have the future to look forward to now, and
20:36
Speaker 3: Sulk has something of a vaccine in the works, so
20:38
Speaker 3: they started limited testing. So he headed on out to
20:43
Speaker 3: the DT Watson Home for Crippled Children to test the
20:47
Speaker 3: vaccine on polio victims. This time parents were asked for consent.
20:52
Speaker 3: I mean, I think he's just kids for consent, But
20:55
Speaker 3: you know, at least progress is being made. Along consent lines.
20:59
Speaker 3: The kids would not be helped in any way by this, because,
21:02
Speaker 3: like if you test a vaccine on people who've never
21:05
Speaker 3: gotten the disease, at least if it works, they are
21:10
Speaker 3: now vaccinated, right, But these kids have already gotten polio.
21:15
Speaker 3: It is a good way to test for antibodies and
21:17
Speaker 3: side effects, and it's basically the kids like helping science
21:21
Speaker 3: at some risk to themselves, but not great risk to themselves.
21:25
Speaker 3: No one had adverse effects, and all of them got
21:28
Speaker 3: more antibodies. So then he tested on crippled children without polio.
21:34
Speaker 3: This is the way it was phrased at the time,
21:37
Speaker 3: and this sounds awful, but it makes some sense. If
21:41
Speaker 3: you test this on someone who's already not able to
21:44
Speaker 3: use their limbs, if they accidentally get polio, they're less
21:47
Speaker 3: likely to get worse than they already are. This could
21:51
Speaker 3: still kill them, though all twenty seven in the second
21:54
Speaker 3: trial were fine. Then they tested the kid's blood on
21:59
Speaker 3: more than kidney cells and that worked too. Then he
22:04
Speaker 3: worked on sixty three kids with mental disabilities, which the
22:08
Speaker 3: justification that salkas is that they are already isolated from
22:11
Speaker 3: society and illness, so they haven't been as exposed to illness,
22:14
Speaker 3: so they're a blank slate and they have a lot
22:17
Speaker 3: of health records. Not all of these kids have parents
22:21
Speaker 3: who could consent, but don't worry. The state's Department of
22:24
Speaker 3: Welfare provided that consent.
22:25
Speaker 1: Now I'm a little worried.
22:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I'm worried to and to be fair and
22:33
Speaker 3: or this is what the people who write really glowing
22:35
Speaker 3: things about him say. He worried like hell as he
22:39
Speaker 3: did this. He said of doing these trials. Quote, when
22:43
Speaker 3: you inoculate children with a polio vaccine for the first time,
22:47
Speaker 3: you don't sleep well for two or three weeks. And
22:50
Speaker 3: like he probably said that, and he probably meant it.
22:54
Speaker 3: Like everything I've read about him, he is aware of
22:58
Speaker 3: the human impacts of what he's doing and sees it
23:00
Speaker 3: as a greater good thing. But he's not callous about it,
23:04
Speaker 3: you know. Yeah, he's maybe a little bit cavalier.
23:08
Speaker 1: He sounds like a I'm trying to wrap my mind around.
23:14
Speaker 1: He feels like the science version of Oh, I want
23:17
Speaker 1: to be remembered. I want to do this great thing totally.
23:20
Speaker 1: I want to be known for this in the history books.
23:23
Speaker 3: He talks about that shit constantly.
23:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, he has that vibe, which can be very I
23:28
Speaker 1: don't care how many monkeys have to die. I'm many
23:31
Speaker 1: kids I have to experiment on. But at the same time,
23:36
Speaker 1: it also sounds like it wasn't all about I just
23:39
Speaker 1: want to be remembered. He actually did want to get
23:42
Speaker 1: to this vaccine.
23:44
Speaker 4: Yeah.
23:45
Speaker 3: I think at the end of the day, his goal
23:47
Speaker 3: was to cure polio, not to become rich and famous, like.
23:51
Speaker 1: Which makes it all the more complicated.
23:53
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and like, this is what it took to
23:59
Speaker 3: save so many millions of children's lives.
24:04
Speaker 2: You know.
24:04
Speaker 3: This doesn't mean that was the way that it should
24:06
Speaker 3: have been done or had to have been done, but
24:09
Speaker 3: it is the way that it was done. Right in
24:14
Speaker 3: the children's hospitals, he had incredible bedside manner. He would
24:17
Speaker 3: laugh at the kids, he would talk through their fears,
24:20
Speaker 3: he would answer questions. And I think this does matter
24:27
Speaker 3: because part of the evil dystopia of like doctor's non
24:30
Speaker 3: consent whatever is the like they're just gonna ignore you.
24:34
Speaker 3: You're just there, You're just meet you know, I said earlier,
24:40
Speaker 3: this is the style of how it's done. At the time.
24:42
Speaker 3: When he presented his findings in nineteen fifty three to
24:44
Speaker 3: the committee, on immunization. They were like, you did fucking what?
24:51
Speaker 1: Hold up?
24:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, And then the whole thing leaked to the press,
24:57
Speaker 3: and I wouldn't Maybe so someone does know and has
25:00
Speaker 3: written about who leaked it to the press. I don't know.
25:03
Speaker 3: I leaned towards this man leaking it towards the press.
25:06
Speaker 3: I did not lean towards that when I wrote this script,
25:09
Speaker 3: but I like, as I learned more, the whole thing
25:12
Speaker 3: leaked to the press, that the polio vaccine was almost ready.
25:15
Speaker 3: It didn't leak to the press like testing on children.
25:18
Speaker 3: It was hey, we think we have a polio vaccine,
25:21
Speaker 3: which is true. They did think they had a poliovaccine
25:23
Speaker 3: because they did have a polio vaccine. So we talked
25:27
Speaker 3: to the press and he was like, hey, I'm actually
25:29
Speaker 3: just cautiously optimistic, and the press was like, hooray, we're saved.
25:33
Speaker 3: And they called it the Salk vaccine, and he was like,
25:36
Speaker 3: please don't call it that. But I don't know whether
25:38
Speaker 3: he was actually like please don't call it that, or
25:39
Speaker 3: if he was like, oh no, please don't call it
25:42
Speaker 3: the Sulk vaccine. My middle name, by the way, is Edward.
25:45
Speaker 3: You know, Like, I just don't write, and people are
25:49
Speaker 3: mad at him in the scientific world, and Jonas E.
25:52
Speaker 3: Salk is getting called Jonas E. Christ by the people
25:54
Speaker 3: who are mad at him.
25:57
Speaker 1: Interesting.
25:58
Speaker 3: Some reports say he hated the public life, some say
26:01
Speaker 3: he reveled in it. I don't fucking know.
26:07
Speaker 1: Jonahs E. Christ.
26:10
Speaker 3: I know which is funny because actually when he was
26:12
Speaker 3: a little kid and he kept talking about He's gonna
26:13
Speaker 3: save everyone, people used to call him like something like
26:16
Speaker 3: Jonas Christ or something like that, and it's like a
26:18
Speaker 3: really funny nickname to give a Jewish kid too, you know.
26:21
Speaker 1: Right, yes, pretty good. And then he got the added
26:26
Speaker 1: middle name that was given to you.
26:28
Speaker 3: Yeah.
26:28
Speaker 1: At this point, totally wonderful father in law.
26:35
Speaker 3: So at this point the figure they might be ready
26:37
Speaker 3: for broader trials. The public needs this vaccine, and there
26:41
Speaker 3: are two groups that are opposed to this public trial.
26:44
Speaker 3: One had a point, the people who support his direct competitor,
26:50
Speaker 3: Albert Sabin, who was convinced that the dead virus vaccine
26:53
Speaker 3: is dangerous. Saulk was using the most virulent type one strain,
26:59
Speaker 3: so if any remain active formaldehyde didn't kill at all,
27:02
Speaker 3: the patient would die, and formaldehyde inactivation was not particularly
27:07
Speaker 3: well studied at this time, and there was no evidence
27:11
Speaker 3: that the dead virus approach would lead to lasting immunity.
27:16
Speaker 3: Sabin was pushing for a live virus oral vaccine, but
27:20
Speaker 3: that comes later, and then you've got early anti vaxers.
27:25
Speaker 1: Woo.
27:28
Speaker 3: A celebrity entertainment journalist, a podcaster of his day was
27:32
Speaker 3: this guy, Walter Winshell. Apparently he's one of the originators
27:35
Speaker 3: of the news entertainment in radio and TV, and he
27:38
Speaker 3: stirred up mass hysteria about how the vaccine was going
27:41
Speaker 3: to kill all the school children. In response to this,
27:44
Speaker 3: Sock was like, I just vaccinated myself and all my children,
27:47
Speaker 3: which is true. And so in nineteen fifty four they
27:53
Speaker 3: have the first big clinical trial. It is the largest
27:56
Speaker 3: clinical trial in history up to that point in the US.
27:59
Speaker 3: One point five million kids were in the test. Six
28:03
Speaker 3: hundred thousand of them got the vaccine. It was a
28:07
Speaker 3: series of three shots and the trial was a massive success.
28:11
Speaker 3: And here's a chunk of like the thousands and thousands
28:14
Speaker 3: of people left out of this story who did a
28:16
Speaker 3: ton of work, is that coordinating this thing was a
28:20
Speaker 3: public health undertaking on an incredible level because you were
28:23
Speaker 3: tracking all of those one point five million people and
28:27
Speaker 3: you're doing it like more or less before computers, Like
28:30
Speaker 3: people did a lot of work.
28:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, and for three shots. Oh gosh.
28:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.
28:36
Speaker 3: I think it's like one shot and then a month later,
28:38
Speaker 3: and then there's one shot a week later and then
28:41
Speaker 3: a month later.
28:42
Speaker 1: Yeah.
28:44
Speaker 3: I think the most accurate headline I saw about this
28:47
Speaker 3: was from an obituary of Sulk that this isn't the
28:50
Speaker 3: polio vaccine that eradicated polio, but it was the polio
28:54
Speaker 3: vaccine that quote turned the tide against polio. Jonas Salk
29:02
Speaker 3: gave this big speech in nineteen fifty five when they
29:04
Speaker 3: announced the test results that it worked, the vaccine worked,
29:08
Speaker 3: we were going to stop polio. He thanked a ton
29:11
Speaker 3: of people. He did not think his team or anyone
29:15
Speaker 3: on it.
29:18
Speaker 1: What are god interesting?
29:21
Speaker 3: Ah huh. They all left crying.
29:26
Speaker 4: Oh that's sad. He got up there and he was like,
29:29
Speaker 4: you're welcome.
29:30
Speaker 3: It was all me, Yeah, totally.
29:32
Speaker 1: And you keep waiting for your name, you know, or
29:34
Speaker 1: some kind of recognition.
29:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, this person usually working side by side with who's
29:38
Speaker 3: like kind of already taking credit for your work, and
29:40
Speaker 3: you're like, ah, but now he's going to say my name.
29:42
Speaker 1: At least finally yeah, right, never.
29:45
Speaker 3: Comes Youngner, the guy who had actually invented a lot
29:49
Speaker 3: of the important shit said about this moment quote. People
29:54
Speaker 3: really held it against him that he had grand standard
29:56
Speaker 3: like that and really done the most uncollegial thing thing
30:00
Speaker 3: that you can imagine. Jonas Salk, for his part, never
30:05
Speaker 3: apologized for this and only spoke with Younger again once
30:09
Speaker 3: in their lives.
30:12
Speaker 1: Do we know how this meeting went?
30:15
Speaker 3: I don't. I wish I did. Younger like later was
30:18
Speaker 3: like I mean, he would say all kinds of shit
30:20
Speaker 3: about what had happened, but he would still also kind
30:22
Speaker 3: of a team player where he didn't try and tear
30:24
Speaker 3: down the vaccine and even Younger's coming out of this
30:27
Speaker 3: looking good. Younger had even more damning stuff to say
30:30
Speaker 3: about Salk, though, when you read about the incidents of
30:35
Speaker 3: vaccines mishaps right, which are like things that fuel anti
30:38
Speaker 3: vACC sentiment today. There was something called the Cutter incident.
30:43
Speaker 3: There was a pharmaceutical company called Cutter. Because we live
30:46
Speaker 3: in this weird country where everything has to be done
30:48
Speaker 3: through all these private corporations, there's a bunch of different
30:51
Speaker 3: companies doing the vaccines right, and so the Salk vaccine
30:54
Speaker 3: is made by a lot of different places, and this
30:56
Speaker 3: one pharmaceutical company, Cutter, wasn't in apt activating the virus. Effectively,
31:02
Speaker 3: this killed eleven people because it caused I don't know
31:06
Speaker 3: the numbers in front of me anymore, about a thousand
31:08
Speaker 3: people to get polio. Younger had seen the problems at
31:13
Speaker 3: the Cutter Laboratories factory and told Sulk about them, and
31:18
Speaker 3: then Sulk, as far as Younger can tell, didn't do
31:20
Speaker 3: anything about it, because that still happened. It's still like
31:26
Speaker 3: went forward and people got the Cutter vaccine and people died.
31:31
Speaker 3: And then in an interview, Sulk went on, I think
31:35
Speaker 3: it was TV and he was like, you know, I
31:37
Speaker 3: wouldn't pat in this vaccine because quote, how can you
31:41
Speaker 3: pat in the sun? What a guy? Right? Well, sure,
31:48
Speaker 3: it turns out he and his team had been looking
31:51
Speaker 3: into patenting it, but their attorney told them they didn't
31:54
Speaker 3: have a chance in hell of successfully pattenting it because
31:57
Speaker 3: it was built on prior work, it was not a
31:59
Speaker 3: new and.
32:00
Speaker 1: Ee, don't you love it when someone's like, oh, I
32:04
Speaker 1: never would have done that, yeah, and then you find
32:07
Speaker 1: out later they definitely tried to do it.
32:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally this is like one of the main things
32:13
Speaker 3: that is like held up as like this whenever there's
32:16
Speaker 3: like a fucking meme level like Instagram post about Salk
32:20
Speaker 3: and the polio vaccine or whatever it's like. And he
32:23
Speaker 3: refused to patent it because how can you patent the sun?
32:27
Speaker 3: You know, you're like, well, their attorney had just told him, quote,
32:32
Speaker 3: if there were any patentable novelty to be found in
32:34
Speaker 3: this phase, it would lie within an extremely narrow scope
32:38
Speaker 3: and be of doubtful value.
32:40
Speaker 1: Doubtful value.
32:43
Speaker 3: One guy Da Henderson, who's another like public health virus
32:47
Speaker 3: researcher guy. I almost fell down another rabbit hole about him,
32:50
Speaker 3: and then I didn't. He has successfully fought smallpox, he
32:53
Speaker 3: put it. Quote. Jonas came in at this point with
32:56
Speaker 3: pretty much everything done except for moving on to wider
32:59
Speaker 3: scale human trials. This vaccine helped a lot. It is
33:04
Speaker 3: a good vaccine. It is what I got as a kid.
33:06
Speaker 3: Probably it is probably what you, dear listener got as
33:09
Speaker 3: a kid if you were raised in America. The rollout
33:14
Speaker 3: was uneven at the time, According to an article in
33:18
Speaker 3: the MIT Technology Review written by Angela Matsayak in two
33:23
Speaker 3: thousand and five, quote By nineteen sixty, less than one
33:28
Speaker 3: third of the population under forty years of age had
33:31
Speaker 3: received the full course of three doses of the Salk
33:34
Speaker 3: vaccine plus a booster. Most of those who had were
33:39
Speaker 3: white and from middle and upper economic classes. The disease
33:43
Speaker 3: raged on in urban areas among African Americans and Puerto Ricans,
33:48
Speaker 3: and in certain rural locales among Native Americans and members
33:51
Speaker 3: of isolated religious groups. Angela also says quote, While Salk's
33:59
Speaker 3: vaccine did slow down the incidents of polio among middle
34:02
Speaker 3: class Americans, its cost and its requirement of three injections
34:06
Speaker 3: and a booster meant that for years the disease continued
34:10
Speaker 3: to affect the poor and others lacking access to proper
34:13
Speaker 3: medical care. It was only after Albert Sabin's oral vaccine,
34:18
Speaker 3: which was cheap, effective, and easy to administer, was licensed
34:22
Speaker 3: for production in nineteen sixty two, that polio could be
34:26
Speaker 3: fully controlled in the United States. So there's another problem too, right,
34:34
Speaker 3: They've just developed this new vaccine, not the new new one,
34:37
Speaker 3: but the Assalk one. But America was so afraid of
34:41
Speaker 3: communism that it couldn't be a public campaign of vaccination.
34:45
Speaker 3: It had to come from the nonprofit, and that nonprofit,
34:50
Speaker 3: the Anti Communist Org that sponsored the whole thing, had
34:53
Speaker 3: a total of nine million shots available. That was not
34:57
Speaker 3: nearly enough. Everyone needed at least three or four. But
35:01
Speaker 3: what they did need was products and services, because that's
35:08
Speaker 3: how you really defeat communism is products and or services,
35:13
Speaker 3: of which there are none in countries that are not
35:15
Speaker 3: the United States of America. Obviously famously, that's why we
35:19
Speaker 3: don't need to do global trade anymore, and we all
35:22
Speaker 3: can buy iPhones that were made in America.
35:26
Speaker 1: It's just clear.
35:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't see any problem with any of this,
35:31
Speaker 3: and if I did, i'd be a trader. And I'm anyway, whatever,
35:35
Speaker 3: here's a bunch of ads, and we're back. If I
35:44
Speaker 3: ever come back to this topic, it'll be to do
35:46
Speaker 3: a deeper dive on Albert Sabin and the vaccine that
35:49
Speaker 3: defeated polio worldwide. The thing I thought I was writing
35:52
Speaker 3: about when I got biographies about fucking anyway. But this
35:56
Speaker 3: was my eleventh hour surprise during my research. So Albert Sabin.
36:02
Speaker 3: He was born Abram Sepperstein in nineteen eighteen in the
36:07
Speaker 3: now Polish city of Beali, stock Well. It was always Polish,
36:10
Speaker 3: but it was part of the Russian Empire, and when
36:13
Speaker 3: he came to the States in nineteen thirty or so
36:16
Speaker 3: with his parents, they anglicized his name. He became Albert Sabin.
36:21
Speaker 3: He spent World War Two traveling all over the world
36:23
Speaker 3: helping develop vaccines against the insect born diseases that soldiers
36:27
Speaker 3: were getting. He basically like did all the stuff that
36:32
Speaker 3: people claimed Salk did.
36:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like Sock is the even though the inverse
36:40
Speaker 1: in terms of the timeline, he's basically like the inspiration
36:44
Speaker 1: for Socks, like the movie character you see. Yeah, he's
36:48
Speaker 1: the one that was actually out there too.
36:49
Speaker 3: Yeah. And he wanted a live vaccine for polio, and
36:54
Speaker 3: some of this was like he just sort of believed
36:56
Speaker 3: in the axiom that dead vaccines don't solve viral problems
37:00
Speaker 3: or whatever, right, But all public support for his vaccine
37:05
Speaker 3: disappeared because the Salk vaccine dropped even though it didn't
37:09
Speaker 3: eradicate polio, because it wasn't able to be rolled out enough.
37:14
Speaker 3: So he started collaborating internationally because he couldn't get support
37:18
Speaker 3: in the United States. Famously, anyone who listens to the
37:21
Speaker 3: show knows that I'm not a big USSR person. The
37:26
Speaker 3: mass testing for the vaccine that eradicated polio happened in
37:30
Speaker 3: the USSR. Salk and Sobin were actually both invited to
37:35
Speaker 3: the USSR, but Salk didn't go and Sabin did. So
37:42
Speaker 3: one hundred million people in the USSR were part of
37:45
Speaker 3: those trials from nineteen fifty five to nineteen sixty one.
37:49
Speaker 3: And it worked. So you have this oral vaccine and
37:54
Speaker 3: it uses a live virus. Because it's a live virus,
37:58
Speaker 3: it creates a stronger immune response and gives longer lasting protection.
38:03
Speaker 3: You don't need needles to administer it. They put it
38:05
Speaker 3: on a sugar cube. This is where the whole spoonful
38:07
Speaker 3: of sugar makes the medicine go down. Thing apparently like
38:10
Speaker 3: it was like a reference to this. Oh I don't
38:12
Speaker 3: know I read that, but I'm like, I'm like, nah,
38:16
Speaker 3: But apparently you don't need boosters. You just need a
38:21
Speaker 3: sugar cube. And because it's live, it's contagious, but in
38:26
Speaker 3: a good way. You get vaccinated. Like they give you
38:30
Speaker 3: a fucking sugar cube, You eat it, and then you
38:32
Speaker 3: go home to your town or village or whatever, and
38:36
Speaker 3: you spread antibodies naturally, and everyone you spread it to
38:41
Speaker 3: is now immune. Dapolio two. There is a downside to this.
38:46
Speaker 3: There's a reason that we use the dead vaccine here
38:48
Speaker 3: in the United States. A few people die every now
38:52
Speaker 3: and then. I've read eight to ten people around the
38:55
Speaker 3: world per year, but I've also read that it's not
38:58
Speaker 3: every year, and it's fewer people than that. I don't know. Basically,
39:02
Speaker 3: like this is getting an administered to millions of people
39:05
Speaker 3: every year, and eight to ten or so of them die.
39:09
Speaker 3: And the people who die they do so because occasionally,
39:13
Speaker 3: incredibly rarely, the virus mutates and becomes active and you
39:17
Speaker 3: have an outbreak, which is then solved by administering a vaccine.
39:23
Speaker 3: The perfect solution to polio that the World Health Organization
39:26
Speaker 3: suggests is that you use both. You use the Sabin
39:30
Speaker 3: vaccine first, and it creates actual herd immunity. Herd Immunity
39:34
Speaker 3: is not the word for let everyone get sick. It's
39:36
Speaker 3: the word for get everyone antibodies. Use the Sabin vaccine
39:41
Speaker 3: and eradicate wild polio. Then you switch over to the
39:44
Speaker 3: Salk vaccine to keep it dead. It just costs more
39:49
Speaker 3: money to do it this way. That's what happened in
39:52
Speaker 3: the US is that they use Salk's vaccine for a
39:56
Speaker 3: little while, but it didn't really do enough, and so
39:59
Speaker 3: then people are like, how come the Commis get the
40:01
Speaker 3: good American vaccine and we don't get the good American vaccine.
40:04
Speaker 3: So then they started using the Sabin vaccine, and then
40:08
Speaker 3: once wild polio was eradicated, they switched back over to
40:12
Speaker 3: the Salk vaccine. When I was like, Sabin did all
40:16
Speaker 3: the same stuff SoC did, but like kind of, Actually,
40:18
Speaker 3: Sabin also tested the vaccine on himself and his family,
40:21
Speaker 3: and he also didn't patent it. And there isn't as
40:26
Speaker 3: much information about him not patenting it that I'm able
40:29
Speaker 3: to find, but it seems as though he would have
40:31
Speaker 3: made about seven billion dollars if he had patented this.
40:36
Speaker 3: What instead he lived off of a teacher's salary for
40:41
Speaker 3: his entire life.
40:43
Speaker 1: I want to be like, good for him, but I
40:45
Speaker 1: also like, I hope, I hope that was purposeful. I
40:49
Speaker 1: believe it was okay. Well, then good for him.
40:52
Speaker 3: He wrote quote, A lot of people insisted that I
40:55
Speaker 3: should patent the vaccine, but I didn't want to do that.
40:59
Speaker 3: It's my gift to all the world's children. And he
41:04
Speaker 3: worked with Cuba in nineteen sixty two, as Castro's Cuba
41:08
Speaker 3: was the first country to actually get They were like,
41:10
Speaker 3: they were like, all right, we're gonna actually commit to
41:12
Speaker 3: getting rid of polio, and I believe that they were
41:14
Speaker 3: the first country to succeed. But while Sabin's vaccine defeated
41:19
Speaker 3: polio around the world, America liked its doctor rock star,
41:23
Speaker 3: and Sulk remained the darling of the press and the
41:25
Speaker 3: political establishment. His wife divorced him for quote extreme cruelty.
41:34
Speaker 1: Oh whoa. I was going to ask you earlier if
41:38
Speaker 1: you thought that they had any love for each other,
41:41
Speaker 1: And now now.
41:42
Speaker 3: As best as I can tell, it sounds abusive. It
41:45
Speaker 3: sounds emotionally abusive, even though he was the one who
41:48
Speaker 3: had been like, come on, come on, don't you want
41:50
Speaker 3: to get married. Come on, I don't have a middle name,
41:52
Speaker 3: give me a middle name.
41:54
Speaker 1: You know.
41:55
Speaker 3: He was just constantly his work was his life, and
41:59
Speaker 3: he like love being famous, and he was like, oh,
42:01
Speaker 3: the pretty girls like me, you know.
42:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
42:05
Speaker 3: The thing I read implies that both of them were
42:07
Speaker 3: cheating on each other. But the thing I read implies
42:10
Speaker 3: it in a way that's kind of like blaming her
42:12
Speaker 3: and then being like, I guess he did it too,
42:14
Speaker 3: and I'm like, man, I wonder who fucking did it more?
42:17
Speaker 3: The fucking rock star anyway, whatever agreed, So he's like
42:22
Speaker 3: ignoring her. He's like choosing where they live, constantly ignoring.
42:25
Speaker 3: She's got three kids with them, and she's not having
42:29
Speaker 3: it anymore. That's like the nicest version. They never really
42:33
Speaker 3: talked about it, And so when she says extreme cruelty,
42:37
Speaker 3: it probably means the sort of patterns of emotional abuse.
42:41
Speaker 3: But I don't know, that's the nicest thing I can
42:44
Speaker 3: picture there. You know, Donna, his now ex wife, stays
42:49
Speaker 3: committed to leftist activism, but he's at this point, first
42:54
Speaker 3: sort of a political and then increasingly into sort of
42:56
Speaker 3: a mystical eugenics, although a weirdly maybe leftist mystical eugenics.
43:02
Speaker 3: I don't know. I'll get into it in a second.
43:04
Speaker 3: He remarries to a woman who also dated Pablo Picasso.
43:08
Speaker 3: He wrote a bunch of books about this biophilosophy stuff
43:11
Speaker 3: he did, where he's all about like, just like we
43:12
Speaker 3: can understand viruses and bacteria, we can understand the humans.
43:18
Speaker 3: I'm just like a very normal thing to think. And
43:22
Speaker 3: he wrote a book called Survival of the wisest. Oh no,
43:27
Speaker 3: if that name sounds sketchy, it's because the book is sketchy.
43:31
Speaker 3: I've read excerpts, and I've read analysis, and I've also
43:34
Speaker 3: it's really fun to read both the Goodreads reviews and
43:36
Speaker 3: the archive dot org reviews, because there's a hick copy
43:39
Speaker 3: of that on archive dot org, and it is more
43:43
Speaker 3: or less calling for the genocide of the stupid. Like
43:45
Speaker 3: one analysis I read was like, this is just a
43:48
Speaker 3: book length thing where he's avoiding using that word, where
43:51
Speaker 3: he continues to say, like, well, the wisest people should
43:55
Speaker 3: develop a new morality as they inherit the earth. In it,
43:59
Speaker 3: he writes, quote, if the quality of human life is
44:04
Speaker 3: to improve, a process of selection, both natural and human
44:09
Speaker 3: will have to choose the wisest for positions of influence
44:12
Speaker 3: and power. Eventually, the struggling in the human domain will
44:17
Speaker 3: be between the wise and the non wise. This implies
44:21
Speaker 3: that those who lead others in ways that are anti
44:24
Speaker 3: evolutionary or that are being counter to the natural process
44:27
Speaker 3: of becoming the being and the and the being is
44:32
Speaker 3: capitalized like the T, but then being is all capitalized.
44:36
Speaker 3: I just want everyone to know that aalk out them, okay,
44:39
Speaker 3: will either be replaced by others possessing wisdom akin to
44:43
Speaker 3: that of nature, capital and in nature, et cetera, et cetera.
44:48
Speaker 3: You see what I mean where I'm like, but this
44:50
Speaker 3: man isn't a good writer. Like when people are like,
44:53
Speaker 3: he's a really good science communicator, I'm like, well, he's
44:55
Speaker 3: not a good philosophy communicator.
44:58
Speaker 1: No, very oversimplify. What I'm picking up here is this
45:05
Speaker 1: was a very early version of you know, nerds will
45:09
Speaker 1: inherit the earth Like. He wanted power. He wanted power,
45:13
Speaker 1: and this was his way of being this scientist rock star.
45:18
Speaker 1: I can be the powerful one. I'm wise, it seems,
45:22
Speaker 1: don't particularly care if I have to run perhaps on
45:28
Speaker 1: ethical tests on mentally disabled people.
45:33
Speaker 3: Yeah.
45:34
Speaker 1: But it's just very interesting to me because it feels
45:37
Speaker 1: very loud in him being like, I'm the one with
45:42
Speaker 1: the power, and totally that's what we should be placing
45:46
Speaker 1: it on, is wisdom.
45:48
Speaker 3: Totally, Like, how is he defining wisdom in this context?
45:51
Speaker 1: Exactly? Because it is true, like you said, I'm all
45:55
Speaker 1: about wisdom. Oh yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, but it
45:59
Speaker 1: just feels very he's placing it in terms of he
46:03
Speaker 1: wanted more power.
46:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, how they were going to do all this eugenic
46:09
Speaker 3: shit once they had power, is that they would build
46:12
Speaker 3: RNA viruses with which to reprogram humans in the embryo.
46:15
Speaker 1: No I know, no, no im media, no from me.
46:25
Speaker 3: It's all right, Well then never mind. I was gonna
46:27
Speaker 3: pitch our new biophilosophy podcast on cool Zone Media, but
46:30
Speaker 3: apparently that's a no, no, it's out. I liked a
46:35
Speaker 3: review that was written on archive dot org about this.
46:37
Speaker 3: There's a five star review quote a must read for
46:41
Speaker 3: anyone interested in the thought process of a Malthusian psychopath.
46:45
Speaker 3: It is troubling to think that this man invented inoculations
46:48
Speaker 3: that were administered on a large scale.
46:53
Speaker 1: But it was five stars.
46:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean like it's like half ironic, but it's
46:57
Speaker 3: like yeah, no, it's like a it's a very useful
46:59
Speaker 3: book with which to understand this particular genre of like okay,
47:03
Speaker 3: and what's interesting again, I haven't read this book yet.
47:07
Speaker 3: Most people talking about it are aware, they're like, this
47:10
Speaker 3: is bad, right, But there's like some people who are
47:13
Speaker 3: kind of like wellness influencer types who are like, oh,
47:16
Speaker 3: this book is like so good. It help us understanding
47:19
Speaker 3: overpopulation and you know how to be our best selves
47:23
Speaker 3: and all of this stuff, you know, So I wouldn't
47:26
Speaker 3: be surprised if this eventually crops up as like a
47:29
Speaker 3: new thing the right gloms onto. But I think again,
47:35
Speaker 3: I haven't read the whole thing yet. I haven't read
47:36
Speaker 3: more than excerps yet. One of the things that he
47:40
Speaker 3: wants to get rid of is diseases, both of the
47:43
Speaker 3: like susceptibility to whatever things that are bad and eugenics
47:49
Speaker 3: to try and cut out, but also diseases like prejudice
47:54
Speaker 3: and like bigotry. And so he's like, oh, we're going
47:58
Speaker 3: to eugenically get rid of racism. Is I think what
48:02
Speaker 3: he's saying.
48:05
Speaker 1: Wow, again, that's a real that's a mind fuck, to
48:11
Speaker 1: be honest with you, I know, that's just like the
48:15
Speaker 1: opposite of eugenics. I don't know.
48:19
Speaker 3: I know, theoretically he'd be accidentally programming his own ideas
48:23
Speaker 3: out of existence if he did this, right. The other
48:28
Speaker 3: thing that people say about him, Okay, when people paint
48:31
Speaker 3: the simple picture of Sulk, that is technically true, but
48:34
Speaker 3: not is here is this man who dedicated his life
48:38
Speaker 3: to trying to make the world better, defeated polio, and
48:42
Speaker 3: then when he was well past retirement age, spent the
48:45
Speaker 3: rest of his life up until his death trying to
48:48
Speaker 3: make a vaccine for AIDS. And that is true. He
48:53
Speaker 3: spent the end of his life trying to create a
48:55
Speaker 3: vaccine for AIDS. Once again, he trusted it enough that
48:59
Speaker 3: he inoculated himself in nineteen eighty seven. I'm not mad
49:02
Speaker 3: at him for trying any of this stuff. Despite some
49:05
Speaker 3: early promising animal test results, he never succeeded. His dead
49:08
Speaker 3: virus approached. Didn't hurt anyone, but it didn't make anyone
49:11
Speaker 3: better either. Albert Sabin died in nineteen ninety three. Jonas
49:15
Speaker 3: Edward Salk died in nineteen ninety five. Yeah, we had
49:19
Speaker 3: our first polio outbreak in the US since nineteen seventy
49:22
Speaker 3: nine in the year twenty twenty two, and one of
49:25
Speaker 3: rfk's advisors, this guy named Aaron Siri, tried to get
49:29
Speaker 3: the FDA to napprove the polio vaccine. So good luck everyone.
49:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really bad.
49:38
Speaker 4: I mean, the FDA chose a guy to lead like
49:42
Speaker 4: the vaccine's division. Essentially at the FDA is this guy
49:45
Speaker 4: named doctor vine Prosad and like friend of the pod
49:49
Speaker 4: doctor Cavajda, And I we.
49:52
Speaker 3: Fucking hate this guy sucks.
49:54
Speaker 4: He spent all of the pandemic trying to get people
49:56
Speaker 4: not to get vaccinated. He's like a scream into the
49:59
Speaker 4: void YouTube guy like the guy that's in charge of
50:02
Speaker 4: the vaccine's division, which is so crazy.
50:06
Speaker 1: It's so crazy.
50:08
Speaker 3: It's like this being monstrously bad at math. Like, take
50:12
Speaker 3: the live polio vaccine. If it kills eight people every year,
50:18
Speaker 3: that's like not what we want a vaccine to do. Yeah, right,
50:21
Speaker 3: if you have a ninety percent chance of dying or
50:24
Speaker 3: a nine percent chance of dying, you pick the nine
50:28
Speaker 3: percent chance of dying because it's a lot better. Yes,
50:32
Speaker 3: you are so much safer. I was trying to explain
50:35
Speaker 3: this to like one of my friends who kind of
50:36
Speaker 3: went off of terrible direction during COVID sure, who didn't
50:41
Speaker 3: want to take the vaccine, like, well, we don't know
50:43
Speaker 3: what it does, And I'm like, but we do know
50:45
Speaker 3: what COVID does, right, So do you take the door
50:48
Speaker 3: that one hundred percent has a monster behind it? Or
50:53
Speaker 3: do you take the door that point zero one percent
50:57
Speaker 3: has a monster behind it? That is really easy math.
51:03
Speaker 4: It sure is the other thing that I you know,
51:06
Speaker 4: I've pointed out. It's like it would be like if
51:08
Speaker 4: they appointed me to make like basketball decisions for the
51:12
Speaker 4: Boston Celtics, who I hate with a fiery pack. It's like,
51:17
Speaker 4: you can't assign a hater to be in charge of
51:21
Speaker 4: the thing that they hate, Like that doesn't make sense.
51:24
Speaker 4: Like this guy spent all of COVID and after it's
51:27
Speaker 4: still just like shitting on vaccines, and they were like,
51:33
Speaker 4: that's the guy.
51:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what we need. More vaccine skepticism, more skepticism
51:38
Speaker 3: of the thing that has successfully destroyed the scariest disease
51:42
Speaker 3: to Americans in nineteen fifty four.
51:44
Speaker 4: We're currently working on a project that's going to come
51:45
Speaker 4: out probably in May on it could happen here. That's
51:48
Speaker 4: about what's going on with measles in Texas. Oh sure,
51:51
Speaker 4: that'll be like an an entire week project that we're
51:53
Speaker 4: working on with the local journalists out there that kind
51:55
Speaker 4: of explains a little bit about like how we got
51:57
Speaker 4: to the skepticism a little bit more h and I
52:00
Speaker 4: think people should listen to that when we drop.
52:02
Speaker 3: It, it's gonna be really good. When I was doing
52:04
Speaker 3: this research, there was a there's a moment in nineteen
52:07
Speaker 3: seventy six, we're actually, both Sabin and Salk were both
52:10
Speaker 3: talking with the President during a swine flu outbreak. That
52:13
Speaker 3: thing that Annie Reese currently has survivor Oh okay, yeah,
52:17
Speaker 3: is contagious for it forever, and everyone needs to make
52:20
Speaker 3: any a pariah. No, none of that's true. None of
52:23
Speaker 3: that's true.
52:24
Speaker 1: But if you could get people to follow that six
52:26
Speaker 1: foot rule again, oh my gosh, yeah, that.
52:29
Speaker 3: Wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
52:30
Speaker 1: It would be only for me though.
52:32
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know I would feel better that you had
52:35
Speaker 4: that boundary because I missed that boundary every day.
52:38
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy six, people thought there was gonna be
52:40
Speaker 3: a really bad swine flu outbreak, and so they did
52:42
Speaker 3: a lot of work trying to vaccinate, and like both
52:45
Speaker 3: Sabin and Salk, I believe were part of this process
52:48
Speaker 3: of trying to get everyone to get a flu vaccine
52:50
Speaker 3: that year, and there was like a like one in
52:55
Speaker 3: one hundred thousand incident of an increased potential of like
53:00
Speaker 3: one particular thing or something, And then the swine flu
53:06
Speaker 3: didn't really hit and so everyone was like, ah see,
53:09
Speaker 3: it is bad, and people sometimes presented as the beginning
53:12
Speaker 3: of the modern anti vax movement, But then I was
53:13
Speaker 3: reading other stuff that was like, no, that actually isn't
53:15
Speaker 3: where there's no continuity there. It all comes back to
53:18
Speaker 3: that stupid fake autism study.
53:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I do think there's a lot of very
53:27
Speaker 1: it feels distinctly American to me. But I just feel
53:30
Speaker 1: like people got so pissed off that we were telling
53:34
Speaker 1: them like, you can't leave, You've gotta wear a mask,
53:38
Speaker 1: Like we were giving them all these rules. Yeah, and
53:42
Speaker 1: instead of thinking of that herd immunity of like the
53:44
Speaker 1: health for everyone, people were just angry that they couldn't
53:50
Speaker 1: do what they wanted to do and then they were isolated.
53:53
Speaker 1: They were going on these rabbit holes that were telling
53:56
Speaker 1: them like it's all a lie, it's five g it just.
54:00
Speaker 4: Yeah, instead of just realizing that, like you know, I'm
54:03
Speaker 4: telling you I miss some of the COVID air or something.
54:05
Speaker 4: I'm like, yeah, I wish you would wear a mask
54:07
Speaker 4: on an airplane. You're in a fucking airless metal tube.
54:11
Speaker 4: A chewa chew a chew cough cough cop Come on,
54:14
Speaker 4: I wish somebody would wear a mask. Six foot rule miss.
54:17
Speaker 3: You curb side pick up?
54:19
Speaker 1: Oh my god? Oh yeah, but.
54:22
Speaker 4: Really the six foot thing, I'm like people used to
54:25
Speaker 4: like give you like I loved it, and now it's
54:29
Speaker 4: like you're in my bubble.
54:31
Speaker 3: Well, I often have people stay about six feet away
54:35
Speaker 3: from me. I know, in order to accomplish that, you
54:39
Speaker 3: have to wear all black and be it like kind
54:41
Speaker 3: of strange trans girl.
54:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, as people travel and stuff, it's like we're you're
54:46
Speaker 4: often the only person on a plane wearing a mask,
54:48
Speaker 4: which is so baffling to me.
54:50
Speaker 3: When I think about the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, where
54:53
Speaker 3: like the new technology of cover your mouth when you cough.
54:56
Speaker 3: We look back and we're like, ha, ha, they didn't
54:59
Speaker 3: know that we should have.
55:01
Speaker 4: Taken wearing a mask on a plane.
55:06
Speaker 3: Wearing a mask when you go to.
55:08
Speaker 4: A hospital or to a doctor's office or somewhere where
55:12
Speaker 4: you know that you're going.
55:14
Speaker 1: To be in a crowd space.
55:15
Speaker 4: What an idea?
55:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, and just as a social norm, there's no one
55:18
Speaker 3: who's going to I don't know. Maybe actually some things
55:21
Speaker 3: do need to be mandate. I'm not sure, but overall,
55:23
Speaker 3: no one's going to arrest you for you just cough
55:25
Speaker 3: into the air, right, but it sure is a faux
55:28
Speaker 3: pas and it should be right, And like I don't know,
55:33
Speaker 3: I don't have solutions here around how public health should
55:35
Speaker 3: be run. I am not enough of an expert. I don't.
55:37
Speaker 3: I genuinely don't think people should listen to podcasters around
55:39
Speaker 3: public health. I think they should listen to people who
55:41
Speaker 3: study it. But people should wear masks sometimes, and people
55:45
Speaker 3: should sneeze into their crook of their elbow and learn
55:49
Speaker 3: that hand sanitizer doesn't stop fecal oral transmission. And you know,
55:54
Speaker 3: love that some stuff.
55:56
Speaker 1: I love how much you love that story.
55:58
Speaker 3: I know, Well it's gonny too, because it's the kind
56:00
Speaker 3: of thing that doesn't really impact people who don't live
56:02
Speaker 3: lives like I do. But if you go to like
56:03
Speaker 3: like a forest defense camp, you have like everyone goes
56:07
Speaker 3: in poops in a we call it a shitter, you know.
56:09
Speaker 3: And in order to it's safely, it's a certain distance
56:11
Speaker 3: away from the kitchen, you have to cover everything. You
56:13
Speaker 3: have to dig a certain depth. You know. It's all
56:15
Speaker 3: this work that people do. And people used to just
56:18
Speaker 3: put some hand sanitizer there. Yeah, but thanks to the
56:22
Speaker 3: work of people explaining how transmission works, that doesn't help. Yeah,
56:27
Speaker 3: So instead you have to build this thing out of
56:29
Speaker 3: five gallon buckets and a foot pump where you can
56:31
Speaker 3: like pump soapy water, and you know, people have like
56:34
Speaker 3: solved this problem, and it's one of these things where
56:36
Speaker 3: it's like, this is a reasonably normal part of my life.
56:38
Speaker 3: It is not a normal part of most people I know,
56:40
Speaker 3: it's lives. An outhouse is not a part of like
56:43
Speaker 3: most of my friends lives. But for many years lived
56:45
Speaker 3: somewhere where an outhouse was the only toilet available, you know. Yeah, anyway,
56:51
Speaker 3: any how you feel that about salk and seven and
56:56
Speaker 3: polio in the future, you know, the future?
57:00
Speaker 1: Uh, you know, honestly, I feel like I say this
57:04
Speaker 1: every time I come on a show like this. I
57:06
Speaker 1: have a million thoughts and I want to talk about
57:09
Speaker 1: all of them. Like you said, there's a lot of
57:12
Speaker 1: paths we could have gone down, but currently it's just
57:16
Speaker 1: it was interesting to hear how displayed out in the
57:21
Speaker 1: past and to juxtapose it with how it's going yeah
57:24
Speaker 1: right now in some frightening ways. But yeah, just the
57:32
Speaker 1: kind of it sounds like there's always been this politicization
57:35
Speaker 1: of vaccines and who gets the credit for them? Yeah,
57:40
Speaker 1: and then are they actually any good for you?
57:42
Speaker 3: Yeah? All that stuff, and the answer is yes, vaccines
57:47
Speaker 3: are great, one of the best technologies I've ever developed.
57:50
Speaker 3: And also all the stuff that they're trying to strip
57:53
Speaker 3: away from social services that are trying to take out
57:57
Speaker 3: all the good parts of the government and leave all
57:59
Speaker 3: the bad parts of the government. And what we need
58:01
Speaker 3: to do is the opposite. Imagine that you should get
58:03
Speaker 3: rid of the bad things and keep the good things.
58:06
Speaker 3: They just got it all backwards. That's the problem.
58:09
Speaker 4: And you know, wash your hands, cuver your mouth on
58:11
Speaker 4: your cough and maybe just like thinking, am.
58:13
Speaker 1: I too close to that person?
58:15
Speaker 3: Maybe I am? Yeah, And don't talk to cops. Don't
58:19
Speaker 3: fucking talk to cops anyway. Well, anywhere can people follow you?
58:26
Speaker 1: People can find me on podcast stuff when Never told
58:29
Speaker 1: You and the podcast Savor wherever you get your podcasts.
58:33
Speaker 3: And that is Savor without a you. Yeah, not that
58:37
Speaker 3: people would assume there's a U and Savor unless they're
58:39
Speaker 3: from Turf Island. But anyway, Hi everyone and bye.
58:46
Speaker 2: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
58:49
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
58:52
Speaker 2: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
58:56
Speaker 2: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your.
58:59
Speaker 1: Podcast yes, and that brings us to the end of
59:06
Speaker 1: this two parter on vaccines with cool people who did
59:09
Speaker 1: cool stuff with Margaret Kiljoy. Shout out to Sophie who's
59:14
Speaker 1: on there, who facilitated, and Ian the producer who helped
59:19
Speaker 1: out planning this whole thing. It was a great experience.
59:22
Speaker 1: We'd love them and go check out that show. If
59:26
Speaker 1: you have not already, if you would like to contact us,
59:31
Speaker 1: you can. You can email us at Hello at Stuffwenever
59:34
Speaker 1: Told You dot com. You can find us on Blue
59:36
Speaker 1: Sky at mom Stuff podcast, or on Instagram and TikTok
59:38
Speaker 1: at Stuff One Never Told You. We're also on YouTube,
59:41
Speaker 1: but we have some new merchandise at Common Bureau and
59:42
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59:44
Speaker 1: your books. Thanks as always to our superduicial cascine or
59:46
Speaker 1: executive Prusumya and our contributor Joey. Thank you. Thanks to
59:50
Speaker 1: you for listening Stuff Will Never Told You. Expection by
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