WHO and the cold war politics of polio: A pre-history to the global polio eradication initiative

While the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988, the idea of eradicating the disease appeared already in the late 1950s. In 1959 Mikhail Chumakov, Soviet colleague of Albert Sabin advocated the new oral live virus polio vaccine as capable of not only curbing, but also eradicating the disease. The WHO's Third Expert Committee Report on poliomyelitis in 1960 raised the possibility of a concerted polio eradication with mass oral vaccination campaigns. Polio prevention in countries like the Soviet Union, Hungary and Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s later became models for polio eradication programs. The merit of certain autocratic measures in successfully preventing or treating disease and the frustrations this perception caused in Cold War thinking became a recurring issue in the history of polio, most prominently during the trials and evaluations of live poliovirus vaccines. Polio, with its novelty as a widespread epidemic disease in the 20th century, its clinical manifestation and its global presence interacted in specific ways with the Cold War. A truly global disease, polio challenged healthcare systems, public health institutions and governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The disease threatened their modernist projects at the foundations by attacking children and causing visible disability requiring long-term treatment. The political stake was pushed even higher by the fact that polio touched upon a foundational point of antagonism in the Cold War: the question of healthcare and socialized medicine. Using the locality of Communist Hungary and based on archival research conducted in the national archives of Hungary, the WHO and the International Committee of the Red Cross, this paper analyzes how political alliances do and do not produce trust – in technologies, in science, in one's own government, in the other side, in doctors and in citizens. Trust that is fundamental to epidemic management.