The Cutter Incident Quotes

“In the United States we believe that injury deserves compensation and that serious injury deserves serious compensation.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“In 1952 the United States had suffered its worst polio epidemic; fifty-eight thousand people (or one of every three thousand Americans) had been affected.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“Salk became the embodiment of a vaccine that would soon save the world from polio. To the public, he was an immediate hero. But members of the scientific community criticized Salk for talking about unpublished data and for pandering to the media.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“To represent type 3 virus, Salk picked a strain that was isolated from a boy named James Sarkett. Unfortunately, the label on the specimen collected from the boy was written sloppily, and the “r” was mistaken for a “u.” As a result, the strain has always been referred to in scientific presentations, medical journals, and product inserts as the Saukett strain.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“One monkey kidney provided enough cells to make between eight hundred and one thousand roller tube cultures. (Monkey kidney cells are still used today to make most polio vaccines.)”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“In 1943, while Jonas Salk was working on an influenza vaccine, there were ten thousand cases of polio in the United States; in 1948, when Salk was typing polio viruses, there were twenty-seven thousand cases of polio; in 1952, when Salk was first testing his ideas on how to make a polio vaccine, there were fifty-nine thousand cases of polio. Almost every American was directly or indirectly affected by this disease.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“In 1951 Salk received a grant from the National Foundation to develop a polio vaccine.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“In the fall of 1951, on the thousand-foot, grandly appointed deck of the world’s most elegant luxury liner, the Queen Mary, Basil O’Connor met a man who seemed to be different from other scientists—Jonas Salk.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“This finding meant that there were at least two different types of polio virus, and infection with one type didn’t protect against disease caused by another type.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“Between 1938 and 1962 the March of Dimes raised $630 million. Of that sum, $70 million was set aside for research; the rest supported the hospitalization and rehabilitation of every polio victim in America.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“Cantor planned to ask each of his listeners to donate one dime to the White House and called the fund-raising campaign “the March of Dimes”—”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“During the next two years, the birthday balls raised an additional $1.3 million. The president’s Birthday Ball Commission was born, and for the first time money was spent on polio research.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“Three years later, when Roosevelt asked O’Connor to run Warm Springs, he responded by converting it into the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, a nonprofit organization supported entirely by grants and gifts. The foundation spent all of its money caring for visiting polio victims.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“The person most responsible for developing a polio vaccine wasn’t Jonas Salk. Nor was it Karl Landsteiner or Simon Flexner or Carl Kling or any of the many researchers, public health officials, or epidemiologists who dedicated their careers to the study and prevention of polio. The person most responsible for eliminating polio from the United States—and later from most of the world—was a Wall Street lawyer named Basil O’Connor.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“Although unappreciated, Maurice Brodie advanced the field of polio research. He was one of the first to show that formaldehyde could kill polio virus; he was the first to figure out that formaldehyde-treated virus induced polio antibodies in children; he was the first to advance the notion that overtreatment with formaldehyde rendered the virus incapable of inducing polio antibodies; and he was the first to claim that a killed polio virus vaccine might induce long-lived protection.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis

“Unfortunately, Kolmer didn’t have a control group (children who had not been inoculated with vaccine) for comparison, so it was almost impossible to tell whether his vaccine was working.”
― Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis