In 1954, a woman called Bernice Eddy was a lab scientist at NIH performing safety tests for the Polio vaccines. Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine was a killed-virus vaccine to be used in a massive national vaccination program. After testing the vaccines on monkeys, she and her team discovered that the vaccine contained residual LIVE polio virus, resulting in the monkeys showing polio-like symptoms and paralysis. These findings pointed to a flawed vaccine manufacturing process. Eddy reported her findings, and she was immediately dismissed from the polio research and given what we today call “whistleblower treatment.”
The flawed vaccine and associated flawed manufacturing process were licensed for public use. 120,000 polio vaccine doses containing an improperly inactivated version of the live polio virus were manufactured and produced. Of children who received the vaccine, 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis, 51 developed paralytic poliomyelitis—and of these, five children died from polio. The exposures led to an epidemic of polio in the families and communities of the affected children, resulting in the death of 5 children and 113 others paralyzed.
https://www.malone.news/p/inconvenient-history-of-salk-inactivated