Sugar Cube Vaccine In The 60s

We stood in line 65 years ago to take sugar cubes to help wipe out polio. Why can't it be the same for COVID in 2021?

The first large-scale use in the United States was April 24, 1960 - known as quotSabin Sundayquot - when thousands of residents of Greater Cincinnati received Sabin's polio vaccine on cubes of sugar. They lined up outside Cincinnati Children's Hospital as well as at schools and churches.

The injectable Salk vaccine was replaced in 1964 by the Sabin vaccine, which was administered by mouth using cubes of sugar. That time, 90,000 people - 60 percent of all Sangamon County residents, adults as well as children - received the vaccine on a single day, March 8, 1964, at 11 quotfeeding stationsquot in the public schools.

Sugar cube was definitely polio vaccine, multi-prong thingie definitely smallpox --- both of which I too had lo those many years ago. Same here -- we lined up for the oral vaccine at the local high school two or three Saturdays in a row, early 1960s. A few years later, we were amused to learn the sugar cube was also being used to administer LSD.

The city was otherwise occupied. At schools, police stations and fire houses, thousands queued up for the privilege of swallowing sugar cubes impregnated with drops of Sabin oral polio vaccine.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, sugar cube distribution became a popular method for delivering the oral polio vaccine. The sugar cubes were impregnated with the vaccine's live attenuated strains, allowing individuals to receive the vaccine by simply consuming the sugar cubes.

In the early 1960s, songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman were working on some tunes for an upcoming movie. One of Robert's children told him about getting the vaccine on a sugar cube.

At first, the vaccine developed by Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin at the University of Pittsburgh was injected. Later, it was given by Sabin vaccine-that sugar cube dosed with serum and taken orally. Polio infection can occur by consuming contaminated food or water. Children are the most common victims, but unvaccinated adults are also susceptible.

Many older Americans got the polio vaccine during a mass vaccination campaign in the 1950s. Some kids received the oral vaccine in a sugar cube.

Dr. Sabin and the Sugar Cube Vaccine Dr. Albert Sabin, of the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio found a brand-new way to vaccinate children against polio - and it involved a sugar cube. Using a weakened version of the live virus, this new vaccine was able to be taken orally.