NMAH | Polio: Scientific and Medical Legacy

The scientific community and the government learned valuable lessons in response to polio. There were changes in government oversight of vaccine development and surveillance of clinical trials for vaccines and drugs, in design of laboratory facilities, and in the nature of rehabilitation.

Rehabilitation
As people who had had polio matured, they became a political and social force. By pushing legislation such as the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, they helped to bring about a consumer-oriented approach to health and to establish the idea that medical care is a right.

Previously, rehabilitation therapy had focused primarily on soldiers and their injuries, aiming “to restore the handicapped to the fullest usefulness of which they are capable,” as the National Council on Rehabilitation stated in 1942.

“The goal of total rehabilitation is to teach the physically handicapped person to live not just within the limits of his disability but to live to the hilt of his capabilities.”
—Dr. Howard Rusk, 1946

Childhood Immunization
Experience with the polio vaccine encouraged public health officers to think in broader terms. The effectiveness of the Sabin oral vaccine resulted in the Vaccination Assistance Act of 1962, a landmark in public health legislation. It provided the states with 36 million dollars to give free vaccines for polio and other childhood diseases. Coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control, the national effort eventually became the focus of an annual infant immunization week, launched in 1977.