Background

In his enthralling The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis (Yale University Press), Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, tells the story of a genuine disaster caused by mass immunization—a disaster that was, however, embedded in an overall medical and scientific triumph: the elimination of polio from much of the world.

The incident was historically important not only because of the children damaged, but because it led to a legal ruling that subsequently inhibited pharmaceutical companies from developing and manufacturing vaccines. If America now routinely has a shortage of vaccines, it is in part the long-term consequence of the Cutter Incident.

An interesting bit of background information about vaccines and the legal system that sometimes works against the best health interests of…nearly everybody.