Between East and West: Polio Vaccination across the Iron Curtain in Cold War Hungary

Abstract

In 1950s Hungary, with an economy and infrastructure still devastated from World War II and facing further hardships, thousands of children became permanently disabled and many died in the severe polio epidemic that shook the globe. The relatively new communist regime invested significantly in solving the public health crisis, initially importing a vaccine from the West and later turning to the East for a new solution. Through the history of polio vaccination in Hungary, this article shows how Cold War politics shaped vaccine evaluation and implementation in the 1950s. On the one hand, the threat of polio created a safe place for hitherto unprecedented, open cooperation among governments and scientific communities on the two sides of the Iron Curtain. On the other hand, Cold War rhetoric influenced scientific evaluation of vaccines, choices of disease prevention, and ultimately the eradication of polio.

Introduction

“…Existing studies of vaccination, for instance, have exposed Victorian attitudes towards the limits of local and national government, 22 while comparative analyses of poliomyelitis vaccines have shed light on the cold-war geopolitics surrounding the trustworthiness of capitalist or communist epidemiological practice and medical ethics. 23 Crucially for this study, work on diphtheria and tuberculosis immunisations has highlighted how different nation-states' cultural attitudes towards medicine and science produced very different interpretations of the same scientific data. 24 This, in turn, resulted in very different policy choices and outcomes.…”

The Socialist World in Global Polio Eradication

“…I have argued elsewhere that the common, global goal of epidemic control created spaces where the two opposing sides waging a Cold War could collaborate, bringing to life unlikely alliances. This was particularly true in the case of polio, which in the 1950s posed an equal threat to East and West, North and South (Vargha, 2014). The early days of polio eradication drew as much on East-West collaboration as on socialist international health.…”

“…Eastern European virologists were also not unknown to their Western colleagues they met at international conferences, collaborated in laboratory work, participated in academic study trips. The collaboration and the personal connections between virologists in the East and West reached back to interwar scientific networks that both sides fostered in the postwar era (Vargha, 2014). Sabin's own research no doubt benefited from this intensive exchange, as he had direct and instant access to work conducted in laboratories across Eastern Europe.…”

“…played a crucial part in virologist Dorothy Horstmann's evaluation of the Sabin vaccine's potency and safety based on the earlymassive trials conducted in the Soviet Union. Demonstrating the efficacy of the vaccine and the validity of the trials, Horstmann argued 33 that the autocratic political system and the top-down, military-like health organization served as a guarantee the ability of the Soviet state to execute a reliable mass trial involving millions of people (Vargha, 2014) If states like the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Cuba were pioneers in a global eradication program, we may well ask whether the success of eradication programs in these countries could be attributed solely to authoritarian governance? To what extent was the success of polio eradication technologies, methods and models mainly a function of coercive state structures?…”

“…Political decisions and scientific assessments regarding disease prevention shaped the development and introduction of the Sabin vaccine and were based on experiences on a very local level. For example, the Hungarian trials and the Sabin vaccine's quick introduction had much to do with the Hungarian government's precarious domestic and international standing after the 1956 revolution, which coincided with renewed polio epidemics despite national vaccination campaigns with the Salk vaccine(Vargha, 2014).Socialist countries in polio eradication: a story of socialist international health ocialist political and social structures had a tremendous effect on the global polio eradication program of the later 20 th and 21 st century. The contemporary international 13 T. Kima and WA Belian, "National Report of Immunisation Program of German Democratic Republic," in Programs of Vaccination, encephalitis and meningitis in enteroviral infections, virological and clinical problems.…”