Covid-19 Vaccine Safety and the Public Trust: Lessons from Paul Meier and Polio

December 7, 2020

(STAT News) – Early results of the Covid-19 vaccine trials sponsored by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are welcome news. We appreciate the urgency of getting these newly developed coronavirus vaccines out to millions of Americans and potentially billions of people around the world. We also know all too well the tragic story of a rushed polio vaccine. We know this story because of our personal connections with Paul Meier, a young statistician at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s who studied the polio vaccine program of 1955 and its aftermath. He was the father of one of the authors (D.E.M.), father-in-law of another (R.S.M.), and mentor of another (C.B.). The missteps that resulted in 40,000 unnecessary vaccine-induced polio infections are being repeated today. Failure to invest in safety and quality as well as speed has the potential to harm many people and further erode the nation’s faith in science and public health.