The East-West Collaboration across the Iron Curtain against Polio Epidemics: Soviet Engagement with Global Health and Poliomyelitis Vaccine Development in 1956-1964

Abstract

The eradication of polio has often been portrayed as an “American story” since the heroes who invented the first polio vaccines, the primary weapon against the disease, were American medical scientists and health administrators. The main protagonists of the story are Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the developers of the IPV and oral poliovirus vaccine. This paper revisits the story of polio vaccine development from a Soviet perspective, focusing on an international collaboration initiated by Soviet scientists who crossed the Iron Curtain and visited the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1955, Mikhail Chumakov, the head of the newly established Soviet Institute of Poliomyelitis, led a small group of Soviet medical scientists to the United States to learn about the Salk polio vaccine. The delegation gained more than just knowledge about American polio vaccine development, but they also established a regular channel for communication and collaboration between Soviet and American medical scientists that led to the national immunization program against polio in the USSR. The vaccine used for the Soviet mass immunization campaign was the Sabin live-attenuated polio vaccine that would ultimately be chosen as the weapon for global polio eradication. This paper suggests that the Soviet science diplomacy in the field of global medicine was shaped by the Soviet scientists’ experience of cooperating with their American counterparts for the Soviet polio vaccination campaign. In other words, the experience of international collaboration on the polio vaccination campaign influenced Soviet science diplomacy in the Cold War era.