"So what happened to polio if vaccines didn’t work?"

Toad734 posed the above question in response to my previous post. Great question.

There are many easy explanations about what happened to polio:

Redefinition of the disease
Once the polio vaccine was introduced, the old, classical, definition of polio was changed from

“a disease with residual paralysis which resolves within 60 days”

to

“a disease with residual paralysis which persists for more than 60 days.”

Given the reality of the polio disease this excludes more than 90% of polio cases, as they used to be defined, pre-vaccines.

Different diagnosis of the disease
Since the 1950s, when a person who has been given the polio vaccine gets polio, it’s not diagnosed as polio, but as viral or aseptic meningitis. But when a non-vaccinated person gets polio, it’s diagnosed as polio, of course. In this way, every media story you read about a polio case will be of a non-vaccinated person.

Walene James, in her book, Immunization, Reality Behind the Myth, provides figures from the Los Angeles County Health Index Morbidity and Mortality, Reportable Diseases which reveals this fact.

----------------Viral or Asceptic

-------------------Meningitis --------------Polio
July 1955 ------------50 ----------------------273
July 1961 ------------161 ----------------------65
July 1963 ------------151 ----------------------31
Sept 1966 ------------256 ----------------------5

(Sorry - I haven't figured out how to insert tables into this blog program.)

Those numbers from one county, it could be debated, may not be representative of the larger population. Well, according to August 15, 2003 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, there are some 26,000 to 42,000 cases of viral meningitis per year in the United States. And that’s where you’ll find tens of thousands of cases of polio disappeared to after the introduction of mass polio vaccination. I can’t place my hands on it right now, unfortunately, but I have a graph that shows the same pattern of polio cases decreasing while aspectic meningitis cases increased that Walene James identified but on a much larger scale in the USA.

Redefinition of “epidemic”
Finally, understanding the manipulation that occurs due to redefinition of an “epidemic” is also important. Prior to the polio vaccine, an epidemic was when there were 20 cases/1,000,000 population (or 2 cases/100,000 population). After the introduction of the vaccine an epidemic required 35 cases/100,000 population. Voila! No more polio epidemics! (You’ll see “epidemics” for different diseases, such as SARS a couple years ago, when there were fewer than 1 case per million population. The definition of an epidemic, it seems, changes depending on the goals of the public health body creating the public health crisis (or miracle!).

These are just a few of the ways the public has been sold on the myth that vaccines are the most important health achievement of the century and that polio has been all but eradicated due to the vaccine…in fact, polio is alive and well, it’s just wearing new labels.