The vaccine worked.

The devastating illness came with force each summer — paralyzing more than 13,000 children each year. It put more in crutches, wheelchairs or iron lungs, and killed thousands.

Polio closed swimming pools and movie theaters. Parents barred their children from playgrounds. Birthday parties were canceled.

Each and every summer from 1916 to the mid-1950s, Americans — wherever there was an outbreak — effectively practiced social distancing.

Even then, it wasn't enough to stop the spread.

The disease reached its peak in 1952, when nearly 60,000 children were infected and more than 3,000 died.

Tom Grant, a member of the Zelienople Rotary Club, co-chairs that club's polio committee with his wife, Marie. Grant, contracted it in 1953 at the age of 17. Today he educates others on the existence of polio globally.

But on April 12, 1955, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, Jonas Salk, declared his poliovirus vaccine to be “safe, effective and potent.”

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“POLIO VACCINE SAFE, EFFECTIVE,” announced an eight-column headline atop 1955's April 12th edition of the Butler Eagle.

By the 1960s, cases of poliomyelitis fell to fewer than 100. In the 1970s, there were fewer than 10 cases. And the last known case of polio in the United States came in 1979 — the same year smallpox was eradicated worldwide.

And according to Carl Kurlander, director of “The Shot Felt 'Round The World” — a documentary on Salk and his polio vaccine — those facts offer hope during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

“People have to remember: we've done this before,” said Kurlander, now a senior lecturer of film and media studies at the University of Pittsburgh, in a phone call Friday.

Kurlander made no pretense of being a medical expert, but said he sees a number of parallels between the annual polio outbreaks and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — namely ventilators and iron lungs, businesses being closed, and parties canceled out of fear the disease would spread.

And while miracle cures with unverified or documented negative efficacy have been marketed to cure both conditions, positives have come out of each, Kurlander said.

“People, because it took your body and not your mind, people rose to the occasion and I think neighbors knew they were all in it together,” he said, noting that health care workers and those participating in social distancing have risen to the occasion in the modern-day health crisis.

But there were a number of differences, too. The recent, ongoing pandemic came unexpectedly and continually reaches new heights.

Polio, on the other hand, was endemic — regularly found — to the United States, punctuated with a number of epidemics. Between 1916 and the 1960s, polio struck every summer. It affected children mainly, with few to no infections in older adults.

“Even when the summer left, you had kids in wheelchairs and kids who died, so people could never forget that polio was around,” Kurlander said.

Mobilizing efforts

Despite the differences, both diseases led the U.S. — and the world — to mobilize as much effort possible to help treat, cure and prevent infections.

In 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which led a fund-raising campaign called the March of Dimes. That society fought against polio, which was at the time called infantile paralysis.

Roosevelt was himself diagnosed with polio at the age of 39 — though medical experts now agree he likely had Guillain-Barre syndrome, following a 2003 study by Texas researcher Dr. Armond Goldman — and was at the head of the foundation when more than $85,000 was sent to the White House in dimes, quarters and dollar bills to help fight polio.

“Everyone felt a part of the polio epidemic and research, and that money would go to crutches” and other items to help polio victims, Kurlander said.

Eventually, that money went toward larger efforts — including funding Salk's vaccine-finding efforts beginning in 1947.

'Polio is conquered'

A team of researchers at Pitt worked to create an inactivated-virus vaccine against polio, something that went against conventional wisdom at the time, according to the university. At that point, researchers thought only live — but weakened — viruses could provide effective inoculation.

Going against the grain, the researchers created the “killed” virus vaccine and Salk administered the vaccine to himself and others in his lab and family without noticing adverse effects, according to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

But more crucial than those receiving the trial drug not developing side effects was that they developed antibodies against the devastating illness.

That research led Salk to drive a massive testing effort, injecting nearly a half-million children in 12 states with the vaccine in a 1.8-million-person trial. The trial began in April 1954 and led such positive results that the University of Michigan — where data results were analyzed — announced the “vaccine works. It is safe, effective and potent.”

A Pittsburgh Press headlined summed it up more succinctly: “Polio is conquered.”

The same day, the Butler Eagle reported the Pennsylvania Health Department readied 11 centers to distribute the vaccine to nearly 500,000 first- and second-grade students in the state.

Butler County would begin its mass inoculation program the following week at the Slippery Rock Laboratory School, the North Butler County Joint School and the Mars High, Evans City and Center Township schools.

In the U.S. as a whole, though, polio immunizations were not fully successful. A California-based laboratory had a defective process of inactivating the virus, leading to 40,000 cases, 200 paralyses and 10 deaths, according to the National Institutes of Health.

“People need to understand why it takes so long, to see if a vaccine works,” Kurlander said. “It's not just that it takes a year, but what's that year involve?”

Though the Salk vaccine was eventually supplanted by a live vaccine introduced in 1961 by Albert Sabin, the immunizations were widely implemented and, as such, successful, with the disease eradicated from the U.S. before 1980.

“In order for vaccines to work, everyone's got to do it,” Kurlander said. “And then, of course, there's anti-vaccination people who are skeptical of any vaccine.”

International efforts

To this day, cases of polio are endemic in two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Rotary International has worked since 1988 to inoculate more people in those countries and, while that program has not been 100 percent successful, work continued up until the coronavirus outbreak.

Grant, who has his own perspective on the disease after contracting it 67 years ago, said today's measures against the coronavirus are more drastic than anti-polio efforts.

“Things were not closed down the way they are today,” Grant said.

According to the International Rotary, 430 million children in 39 countries were vaccinated against the disease in 2017. In 2019, the organization announced $100 million in grants to help fight the “last mile of eradication.”

Those efforts may be on hold, however, as clubs all over the globe focus efforts on the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We just got word from Rotary International that they have suspended the worldwide (polio) eradication program that Rotary supports,” Grant said. “And all those resources and all those people are going to be available” to fight COVID-19.

And as Rotary reallocates its resources to fight the coronavirus, Kurlander said he believes the lessons from the fight against the paralyzing disease can help in the current pandemic.

”You can't tell when you're in it, but you have to look back and see polio to have that reassurance that we did this before, good came out of it, and we can do it again,” he said.