To compare the springs of 1955 and 2021 is to see our own moment a little more clearly. In terms of scale, impact, and complexity, the coronavirus pandemic has vastly exceeded just about every contagious calamity in recent history, and the vaccines that are bringing it to an end are, by any measure, more scientifically impressive than the vaccines of the past. And yet, for many of us, it’s hard to feel the momentousness of the season through which we’re now living. Americans in the nineteen-fifties were unabashedly jubilant about the vanquishing of polio. But we are strangely uncertain in our celebration of our vaccines.
There are many reasons for our reticence. Americans in Francis’s time had spent decades waiting for a cure for polio; by 1954, when Francis began his vaccine field trial, more people knew about the Salk vaccine than could recite the full name of President Eisenhower. The development of our vaccines, by contrast, has unfolded in the course of a single, confusing pandemic year, from which we’re still reeling.
The clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccines involved tens of thousands of participants, but occurred mostly out of public view, and were seen mainly as technical exercises. But the Francis trial, once it started, was a subject of sustained, detailed public attention, in large part because it centered on children. Two million families, living in two hundred and seventeen locales, signed their kids up to be “Polio Pioneers”; like the fund-raising done through the March of Dimes, the trial was a shared, nationwide effort. (In the end, six hundred and fifty thousand kids ended up getting the vaccine during the trial; more than a million got a placebo.)
In 1955, there was just one polio vaccine. Americans today are receiving one of three different COVID-19 vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration. (More vaccines are being produced and tested in other countries.) The three vaccines on offer in the United States, manufactured by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, differ in how they are administered—one shot or two? Twenty-one or twenty-eight days apart?—and interested Americans find themselves examining the statistics for each, parsing the distinction between efficacy (a vaccine’s performance under ideal, experimental conditions) and effectiveness (its performance in the real world). People are asking themselves which one to take.
Just as there is no single vaccine, there is no singular medical hero to idolize. Anthony Fauci and others have done the important work of explaining the pandemic to the American people; Joe Biden has appointed a team of highly accomplished doctors, scientists, and administrators. But we have had no scientific figure along the lines of Jonas Salk to lead us forward; for the first year of the pandemic, the figure that loomed largest was Donald Trump. Trump’s primacy is emblematic of larger changes. In the nineteen-fifties, trust in science and political leadership was high, but our era is characterized by widespread distrust of government. Science is often seen as biased, and anti-vaxxers and political opportunists have turned vaccine hesitancy into a form of ideology.