The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis [Hardcover]

Dr. Paul A. Offit M.D. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 10, 2005

Vaccines have saved more lives than any other single medical advance. Yet today only four companies make vaccines, and there is a growing crisis in vaccine availability. Why has this happened? This remarkable book recounts for the first time a devastating episode in 1955 at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, thathas led many pharmaceutical companies to abandon vaccine manufacture.

Drawing on interviews with public health officials, pharmaceutical company executives, attorneys, Cutter employees, and victims of the vaccine, as well as on previously unavailable archives, Dr. Paul Offit offers a full account of the Cutter disaster. He describes the nation’s relief when the polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk in 1955, the production of the vaccine at industrial facilities such as the one operated by Cutter, and the tragedy that occurred when 200,000 people were inadvertently injected with live virulent polio virus: 70,000 became ill, 200 were permanently paralyzed, and 10 died. Dr. Offit also explores how, as a consequence of the tragedy, one jury’s verdict set in motion events that eventually suppressed the production of vaccines already licensed and deterred the development of new vaccines that hold the promise of preventing other fatal diseases.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After a wave of books celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, Offit's troubling account is the first to focus on a largely forgotten aspect—one with negative repercussions 50 years later. In a nuanced examination of a complex story, Offit, a professor of pediatrics and expert in infectious diseases, relates how Cutter Laboratories, one of several pharmaceutical companies licensed to produce Salk's killed-virus vaccine, shipped many lots of vaccine containing live virus, creating a mini polio epidemic: 40,000 children became ill, 200 were permanently paralyzed, 10 died. Offit carefully examines how Cutter was and was not responsible: tests for detecting live virus at the time were simply not sensitive enough, but Cutter departed from Salk's safe production protocols. And while the company knew there was a problem, it failed to notify the government's oversight agency. Cutter faced costly lawsuits that have resulted, according to Offit, in today's vaccine crisis: shortages (think of last year's flu vaccine) due to pharmaceutical companies' unwillingness to risk testing and producing vaccines and face possible litigation. In another example of the law of unintended consequences, Offit shows how "the Cutter Incident" led Salk's vaccine to be replaced by a less safe one: Sabin's live-virus vaccine. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Pointing to recent shortages of flu and several childhood-disease vaccines as well as the dearth of new vaccines, Offit says that pharmaceutical companies are staying away from vaccine research and production in droves. He lays responsibility for this lamentable situation on the outcome of a court battle now 50 years old and the subsequent snowballing of legal and legislative reactions. Beginning with a tragic 1955 error at Cutter Laboratories--one of the first companies producing the Salk polio vaccine--that caused polio in thousands, Offit maps the way the courts have handled pharmaceutical liability, the way juries have awarded damages, the federal Vaccines for Children Program and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and other influences on vaccine development. Those trends and agencies have so inflated the costs and risks relative to probable profits that vaccine production has been discouraged. Offit concludes that, because the U.S. has made risks high and profits negligible, many more children will suffer illnesses that can be prevented. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (October 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300108648
• ISBN-13: 978-0300108644
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #966,694 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A real problem and a contentious solution, October 31, 2006

By 

Harry Eagar (Maui) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis (Hardcover)

There's a lot of noise about vaccines today, what with bird flu and who knows what over the horizon, but nothing compared with 50 years ago, when the Salk polio vaccine was introduced.
People younger than about 60 years old can hardly imagine the fear that gripped American parents every summer then. The shadow of the iron lung was far more terrifying than the shadow of the atomic bomb.
Salk vaccine worked and, under proper controls, was safe.
But controls were not proper, and vaccine made by Cutter Laboratories killed 10 people and paralyzed a few hundred more. At least several hundred thousand Americans were exposed to live polio virus. More did not become severely ill because fewer than one percent of people exposed to wild virus show symptoms.
Physician Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher and pediatrician in Philadelphia, says the "Cutter Incident" was more than just a forgotten medical mishap.
The net Offit casts brings back an amazing variety of things: research on aborted fetuses, Eddie Cantor and Nancy Reagan, Nobel Prizes and presidential politics, irresponsible journalists, backstabbing researchers.
Offit, a skilled expository writer, packs a lot of information into the first 130 pages to set up his current concern: That the fallout from Cutter Laboratories' bad vaccine led to legal precedents that continue to endanger lives today.
In other words, Offit has reached back half a century to find a hook on which to hang a plea for tort "reform."
Tort reform is a swamp with only a narrow causeway through it.
On the left hand lie the plaintiffs' lawyers, greedy, sensationalist and underhanded, as exemplified by the Milli Vanilli raid. On the right hand lie the corporate lawyers, who want their employers to enjoy all the benefits of legal personhood without any of the responsibility that flesh-and-blood persons bear.
However, it gets complicated.
For every flimflamming plaintiff's lawyer, there's a hard-fighting advocate who puts up his own money (in one case I know of, by taking out a second mortgage on his home) to get justified satisfaction for a penniless victim.
And for every Wall Street Journal editorial writer whose idea of reform is "loser pays" -- that is, the rich buy verdicts -- there's a corporation ruined by lies flogged by "consumer rights activists" -- Bendectin, for example, a safe drug no longer available to pregnant women.
Offit's proposal, not new but not catching on either, is for "drug courts," expert tribunals .
Instead of juries, his courts would have specially trained judges who could call on court-paid, neutral experts to assist judges to rule up or down on a vaccine's safety.
It is inevitable that when tens of millions are treated, some persons receiving even safe vaccines will have medical disasters, and it is not always easy to prove whether the vaccine was involved or not. In Offit's plan, a fund would compensate the authentically injured without necessarily affixing blame.
It would be not unlike no-fault auto insurance, although even closer to an existing federal National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
Offit believes it could recompense the injured (or merely unlucky) fairly while heading off frivolous lawsuits and encouraging pharmaceutical manufacturers to press on with research in risky, less lucrative areas of medicine.
Certainly Offit is on firm ground when he pleads to get decisions out of the hands of citizen jurors. If polls of Americans' beliefs and backgrounds are reliable, then on the typical jury of 12 persons, there are two or three who believe that disease is caused by demons, and not even one with any detailed knowledge about what viruses are or vaccines do.
As a result, we have got what Offit calls "a court system that functions as a national lottery for health care."

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great read!, August 14, 2011

By 

Quinn Thornton - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis (Paperback)

While some may find this book too 'pro-pharma', I found this book spot-on. The public wants 100% safe, inexpensive, readily available drugs and vaccines. This book explains why this isn't going to happen--at least, not until the trial lawyers are reined in.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and readable, January 11, 2010

By 

JP (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis (Kindle Edition)

Really enjoyable and readable by the layperson. A fascinating look at why we do some of the things we do -- and just why polio is so frightening.