The Cutter Incident - did we learn anything from the Covid vaccine rollout?
In 1955, a vaccine catastrophe changed regulation forever—or so we thought. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed how quickly those hard-won lessons were cast aside.
When Jonas Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine was announced in 1955, it was met with national celebration. Polio was a highly infectious virus that could paralyse or kill children, and Salk’s vaccine was seen as a breakthrough.
So it was no surprise that the U.S. government rushed to roll it out. But in the haste to scale up production, oversight of the manufacturing process slipped.
One manufacturer, Cutter Laboratories, failed to properly inactivate the virus in some of its vaccine batches. The consequences were devastating.
Around 200,000 children received doses that inadvertently contained live poliovirus. More than 200 were paralysed. At least 10 died.
This event - now known as the Cutter Incident - was dubbed one of the worst biological disasters in American history, and became a defining moment in medical regulation.
It exposed a critical vulnerability in vaccine production: protocols that are safe and effective in the lab don’t always hold up under the pressures of large-scale manufacturing.
It was meant to leave a permanent scar on the regulatory psyche - a lesson in the danger of rushing biologics to market without adequate oversight.
Seventy years later, that lesson has been forgotten.