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Epidemics come (and one hopes), go when the right vaccines are developed and all, or at least a large proportion, of the inhabitants of a country are properly inoculated. Polio used to be a

disease affecting millions of children all over the world, causing death and paralysis. I remember that in 1948 in Hungary two of my friends caught the virus: one remained lame in all his

life, the other one died within a few weeks. It has been known for a long time that there are two main versions of a vaccine, live and dead; the live one has to be made less potent before it

can be used. And the dead one first has to be killed and the hope is that when applied it will still be able to produce antibodies. Maybe the live one is better because that is how nature

produces the virus, so it may give rise to more copious antibodies. For polio the two varieties, dead and alive, were developed in the US by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin (both immigrants)

respectively. There was actually another difference between the two vaccines. Salk’s had to be injected, Sabin’s was given to children with a cube of sugar. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union

there were increasing numbers of polio cases. The question to consider was: “Should we ask the Americans to share with us both the vaccine and how it is manufactured?” A delegation

consisting of Mikhail Chumakov, his wife, Marina Voroshilova and Anatoli Smorodintsev, all three well-known virologists, travelled to America in early 1956. Chumakov was at the time the

Director of the Ivanovski Instiute. They visited the laboratories of both Salk and Sabin and had discussions with other American scientists. At the time the dead Salk virus was already being

tested in America. The vaccine worked well. The inventor was celebrated. The live Sabin vaccine had not as yet been licensed. Chumakov asked Sabin to send him the live vaccine for testing

and producing. Sabin sent his strains of the live attenuated virus, enough for 300,000 vaccinations. This was the beginning of a decade-long collaboration between Sabin and Chumakov. They

had a lot in common. They were both born of poor parents, Chumakov in the Tulskiy region of Russia and Sabin in Byalistok, in the Pale of Settlement. They both managed to go to University

(Sabin in New York, Chumakov in Moscow). Both became well known researchers in virology; Chumakov became famous early in his life for identifying the virus causing tick-encephalitis. Both

ran their laboratories with an iron hand. The Russian scientists started their mass vaccination programme in 1958. The surprising thing was that they managed to get permission to do so. Much

of the objection was based on the fact that the Sabin vaccine was not as yet approved for use in the US. The argument went thus: “Why do you think the Americans provide us with that

vaccine? They don’t want to try them on their own people. They want us to suffer the consequences of failure.” The more radical opponents of the vaccine believed it was an imperialist plot

designed to kill all Soviet children. According to one story permission was refused initially, but they managed to get it with the support of Anastas Mikoyan, a member of the Politburo, the

highest organ of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, whom Chumakov knew in person. Sabin refused to patent his vaccine. He gave all the relevant information to Chumakov, enabling him to

produce the vaccine in his own laboratory. Thus the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to develop, produce, run mass trials and license the Sabin vaccine. Altogether they

vaccinated 16.5 million children in the Soviet Union. They also offered their vaccine to Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where extensive trials were held shortly afterwards. Chumakov also

exported his vaccine to over 60 countries worldwide. Were there any objections to this collaboration? After all there was a Cold War on and a fairly thick Iron Curtain separating the

participants. Sabin had the green light from the US State Department, in spite of some objections from the Department of Defense. There were of course objections in the USSR from the MGB (as

the Secret Police was called at the time) but they were overruled by Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan. The campaign turned out to be very successful. The American health authorities

acknowledged that the delivery of the vaccine and the evaluation of its efficacy were done at a high standard, leading to its licensing without further trials in the US. As a result of the

mass vaccination campaign, polio was entirely eradicated in the Soviet Union. Sabin, in acknowledgement of his role in providing the vaccine and offering further collaboration, received the

medal of the Order of Friendship Among Peoples from the Soviet government. World-wide, the Sabin vaccine reduced polio cases from 350,000 in 1988 to around 650 in 2011. Most of the

information for this article I got from a lecture and treatise by a Hungarian virologist, an article in the _Scientific American_, several articles in the _British Medical Journal_ and a

short biography of Chumakov, both in the Russian and in the English language version of Wikipedia, resurrecting my old habit of comparing Western and Russian versions. They were practically

identical apart from one single sentence. The relevant three sentences of the English version are given below: “From 1950 he was the Director of the Ivanovski Institute of Virology In

Moscow. In 1952, as a part of the anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union, known as Doctors’ plot, he was removed from the Ivanovsky Institute for refusal to fire Jewish associates. In

1955 he organised a new Research Institute near Moscow.” In the Russian version the middle sentence, referring to the Doctors’ plot and Chumakov’s sacking, is missing. Well, not very

surprising; glasnost had only a short life in Russia. Wikipedia is apparently censored — or is it self-censored? I don’t know. I suppose it is still nearer to the truth than the Bolshaya

Sovietskaya Ensiklopedia (Great Soviet Encyclopaedia), which was always busy rewriting the past according to the latest twists of the Party line. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only

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