Medicine: 269,000 Needles

As the second-graders trooped to the inoculation room in McLean, Va., Randall Kerr, 6, was where he had begged to be: at the head of the line. He was not only the first in Fairfax County, but the first child in the nation inoculated in the mass trials of the polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas E. Salk (TIME, March 29). Randy, like the rest of the Virginia kids, knew that he was getting real vaccine. (In a dozen states, half the children are being given an inert control substance.) Randy’s comment: “I could hardly feel it. It hurt less than a penicillin shot.”

Long, tedious manufacturing and testing the vaccine for safety had delayed the trials so that in some areas they had to be canceled. In the Atlanta district, where plans had been well made in advance (TIME, April 26), two cases of polio, one of them paralytic, had appeared unseasonably early, and no vaccinations can be given where the disease has already begun its annual upswing. Other areas were certain to be similarly hit. Milwaukee decided to drop out because local health officers wanted to wait so long-to see how things go elsewhere-that there would be no time for the trials before school’s out.

But by week’s end, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis reported, the $7,500,000 trial was off to a good start, with 269,000 children needled in 30 states.