The Last Time a Vaccine Saved America

April 12, 2021

(The New Yorker) – On the morning of April 12, 1955, an epidemiologist named Thomas Francis, Jr., took the stage of the Rackham Auditorium, at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Short and portly, in his mid-fifties, with a long face and a close-clipped moustache, Francis was there to deliver a ninety-minute lecture on the vaccine field trial he had just completed. The trial had evaluated the efficacy of the poliovirus vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, a former postdoc in Francis’s lab.