On this day, April 12, 1955, it was announced that the polio vaccine Jonas Salk developed was safe.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. "Even the popular polio shot had its haters."

HISTORY

The Loneliest Anti-Vaxxer

Even the popular polio shot had its haters.

BY NICK KEPPLER
NOV 26, 20215:45 AM



One side of a Polio Prevention Inc. flyer, undated. Eclectibles Ephemera/Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America

On March 26, 1953, virologist Jonas Salk announced a successful initial test of his polio vaccine. Newspaper front pages gleefully trumpeted good tidings. In 1952, polio had peaked in the U.S. with about 58,000 infections, resulting in 3,145 deaths and 21,269 cases of paralysis. As outbreaks moved from city to city, swimming pools and movie theaters closed, and parents safeguarded children at home. Salk’s announcement marked the start of the largest medical experiment ever conducted at the time, a placebo-controlled study of 1.8 million children in 44 states, carried out in 1954, that would pave the way for the near eradication of the disease. ... Duon H. Miller, the cantankerous owner of a cosmetics company in Florida, was having none of it.

Under the banner of his organization, Polio Prevention Inc., Miller distributed hair-raising mailers with claims like “Thousands of little white coffins will be used to bury victims of Salk’s heinous and fraudulent vaccine.” A self-made shampoo magnate, he was one of the few malcontents who publicly campaigned against the polio vaccine. His crusade shows that even during a public embrace of the polio shot that many people frustrated at COVID anti-vaxxers have held up as the ideal reaction to a new lifesaving vaccine, there was dissent, some of it as vitriolic as that you find in the corners of Twitter that swap anti-Fauci memes and Bill Gates rants—and just as weird.

To Miller, “polio” was not an infectious disease. It was a state of malnutrition caused by midcentury American diets, particularly soft drinks—his mortal enemy. “Disease and malfunction do not ‘strike’ us; we build them within ourselves,” he wrote in one of his two-sided handbills. “Children permitted to indulge heavily in soft drinks (especially ‘colas’), over-sweetened and refined starchy foods are the greatest sufferers from POLIO. NO CHILD OR ADULT ON A COMPLETELY COMPETENT AND BALANCED DIET EVER CONTRACTS POLIO.” {snip} “The flyers this Miller guy was sending out, a lot of it mirrors what we hear today” in the COVID anti-vax movements, said Jonathan M. Berman, a research scientist and author of Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement. “He was arguing about germ theory. We see people arguing about how coronavirus is misdiagnosed or is actually the flu or you can’t get it if you are in a certain state of health.” {snip} To Miller, the disease wasn’t real. The conspiracy was. The “experts” were criminals. The vaccine was actually dangerous. This was your libertarian uncle’s Facebook profile, 50 years before there was Facebook. But unlike modern anti-vaxxers, Miller depended on the U.S. Postal Service—which proved, in the end, to be a more effective gatekeeper than social media has been for us.

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He founded his cosmetics company in his garage in Dayton, Ohio, according to a 1969 obituary, and grew Duon Inc. to become one of the largest shampoo manufacturers in the U.S. Its marquee product was a shampoo called Vita-fluff. Miller’s name was frequently to be found in the society sections of newspapers. He gave photography tips in the Dayton Journal-Herald and showed off boxers from his breeding pens. His first wife sang to entertain at PTA meetings in Dayton.

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Front of 1951 pamphlet by Polio Prevention Inc. Eclectibles Ephemera/Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America

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Like today’s COVID skeptics, Miller cherry-picked physicians who were skeptical of polio as a virus and misrepresented facts. One mailer was a rapid fire of out-of-context information: Salk “isn’t entirely satisfied with the vaccine.” Some children still got polio after being vaccinated. And just as the “real” number of COVID-19 deaths pales in comparison to vaccine deaths in some dark corners of the internet, so it was with polio in Miller’s world: “Polio ‘CRIPPLES’ and Polio ‘DEATHS’ are merely ‘Statistics’ to the ‘Charity-Brokers,’ whose record to date of ‘Cripples’ and ‘Deaths’ is TRULY DISGRACEFUL.”

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