polio vaccine

It looked as if polio would be the second human disease to be eliminated — after smallpox. But "2020 has been a terrible year," the head of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative says.

In the 1950s, as Dr. Jonas Salk and virologist Albert Sabin worked to create a vaccine to prevent infantile paralysis, the threat from polio was already long familiar to Americans.

The children and preteens of the U.S. polio epidemic of the 1940s and '50s are once again in a high-risk group, this time for coronavirus. They recall their experiences and the parallels to today.

For decades, scientists have observed an extraordinarily positive side effect among children who receive the measles vaccine. Researchers are now finding that other vaccines confer added protections.