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

~ Dr. Paul A. Offit M.D. (Author) "ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 18, 1955, JOSEphine Gottsdanker drove her five-year-old daughter, Anne, and ten-year-old son, Jerry, to the pediatrician..." (more)
Key Phrases: inactivate polio virus, mineral oil vaccine, failed safety tests, Cutter Laboratories, United States, Jonas Salk (more...)

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

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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: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #349,605 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 21 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 (REAL NAME)

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."

21 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Cutter Incident, January 4, 2006

By	C. Moser (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

The author presents the science and legal outcomes of this polio vaccine disaster in a clear and easy-to-understand manner. While telling a historical event, the author was aptly able to show how families today are still being affected-making this book a great read for those who have wondered just what is going on with vaccines, vaccine shortages, and the vaccine industry.

48 of 94 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lining Offit's Pockets, September 8, 2005

By	A Vaccine Researcher "Dad against Mercury" - See all my reviews

Paul Offit has stood against "informed consent" many times insisting that sometimes it is better for parents NOT to know about what actually goes into vaccines, including mercury, aluminum, aborted foetal tissues, components derived from crab blood, etc. Paul Offit also has stood up against due process for folks who have sustained vaccine injuries. Good heavens! If Merck is found liable for vaccine injuries, good ole Paul could lose money...

If you want to know what Merck wants you to know about vaccines, buy this book...