Anne Gottsdanker barely remembers getting the shot. She recalls the doctor coming to her parents’ house in Santa Barbara that California spring morning in 1955, but doctors did that in those days.
She was 5 years old and certainly unaware that she was supposed to be among the first to benefit from a miracle: a new vaccine against polio, the disease that every year left thousands of children in leg braces or wheelchairs. Or worse.
But, as it turned out, she wouldn’t benefit.
The serum that went into Anne Gottsdanker’s arm that April day did the opposite of what it was supposed to do: It made her sick and left her crippled.
It gave her polio.
Fifty years ago this month came the official announcement: Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine worked. Developed in a lab at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and funded by millions of dimes collected at schools and movie houses, the news lifted a cloud that hung over parents nationwide.
But no sooner did the country begin lining up for this miracle than the unthinkable happened: A batch of “bad” vaccine began killing and crippling children.
The culprit was two lots of vaccine made by a California company – with a branch in downtown Denver – called Cutter Laboratories.
Before that vaccine was banned, 120,000 children – 2,500 in Colorado – were inoculated with it. About 40,000 developed polio symptoms, and 113 were paralyzed. Five died.
The Cutter incident would forever change how vaccines are made and tested in the United States. It led to the expansion of the federal agency now known as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and opened the doors to a new era of medical and product liability that still affects medicine.
In 1938, President Roosevelt, who had polio himself, had established the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis – now the March of Dimes – and asked every American to chip in a dime, launching an unprecedented nationwide fundraising effort.
In one year, polio attacked 57,879 Americans, most of them children.
Dr. Jules Amer, a Denver pediatrician then and now, treated polio patients. And 50 years later, his memories of the virus are vivid.
In those days, he, recalled: “You’d go to see a child, a perfectly healthy little child with a high fever, and you wouldn’t find very much that first visit. But, of course, in the back of the mother’s mind and the doctor’s mind is ‘Could this be … ?’ ”
But in 1954, nearly 2 million second-graders – including 15,000 in Colorado – became “polio pioneers” as doctors and nurses injected them with an unproven vaccine, in what remains the largest human clinical trial in the country’s history.
After a year, the results of the trial were clear. On April 12, 1955, Dr. Thom as Francis of the University of Michigan, who designed the study, announced that the vaccine worked.
Amer recalls that “even before I knew we were going to get a limited supply, there were patients waiting outside the door. Lines of them.”
The vaccine that Amer gave those children, he said, was made by Cutter Laboratories.
None of his patients got polio from the vaccine, he said, “but there were several doctors in town whose (patients) did, and it was just devastating to them.”
The epidemiology branch of the then-Communicable Disease Center created a special unit to investigate what was happening.
“I ran that unit,” said Dr. Neal Nathanson, now an associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.
“But I didn’t have any special training” in epidemiology or public health.
The team did its job quickly. “Soon it became very apparent that there were two lots of Cutter vaccine that accounted for most of the problem,” Nathanson said.
On April 27, 1955, two weeks after the announcement of a successful vaccine, the U.S. Public Health Service banned Cutter’s vaccine. Surgeon General Dr. Leonard Scheele urged the public not to panic – the move was just a precaution, the vaccine was safe.
The public desperately wanted to believe it was, but meanwhile, Anne Gottsdanker was starting to get sick.
She was on vacation with her parents and older brother. She remembers getting a fever, “throwing up a lot” and her parents cutting the vacation short.
“The next thing I remember is being in the hospital, and I couldn’t move my arms or legs,” said Gottsdanker, now 55.
She spent three months in the hospital, re-learning to use her arms and legs.
The cases of Gottsdanker and a boy named James Randall Phipps were the first lawsuits filed against Cutter Laboratories to go to trial.
Ultimately, the jury found that Cutter was not negligent but that “we have no alternative but to conclude” the vaccine gave the children polio.
In a verdict that Gottsdanker’s attorney, Melvin Belli, hailed as “the first big case holding that a manufacturer of goods is responsible for the goods, even if there is no negligence proved,” the children were awarded a total of $147,300. Of that, $131,000 went to Gottsdanker.
Cutter eventually settled 50 lawsuits, paying nearly $2 million – an enormous amount at the time.
The company never again made human vaccine.
Gottsdanker uses a wheelchair now, after decades of using crutches. She teaches at a community college outside Los Angeles.
She says she’s not angry about what happened to her, and a wry sense of humor bears that out.
“I have two great kids, a wonderful husband and a job I love. If I can’t go skiing, well, there are lots of other people who can’t as well.”
But life hasn’t been easy. Growing up, kids teased her, adults stared and classmates went off to dances she could never attend.
In junior high, doctors advised her to get another polio vaccine to protect against other forms of the virus.
Swallowing that sugar cube was one of the scariest things she ever had to do, Gottsdanker recalled.
That, and watching her children get polio vaccines.
“Your heart is in your mouth, and you’re crossing your fingers,” she said. “But my feelings were that in the 30 years that had elapsed since I had the vaccine, they had to have improved it.”
Denver Post librarians Ann Feiler and Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.
