Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, February 23rd, 1954, children from the Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh

received injections of the new polio vaccine.

The polio vaccine was developed by Dr. Jonas Sulk. He'd been

developing it for about two years and the spring of 1954 was when the field

trials for this vaccine actually began shots in arms.

Thousands of kids including Salks' own were part of this first effort.

Some received the vaccine, some received a fake shot, and some received nothing at all. And the start of this, the announcement of vaccine trials,

as you can imagine, was a major, major milestone,

a cause for celebration.

It is one of those, I remember where I was,

moments for I think an entire generation I don't

need to convince anyone listening now how good that kind of news can feel and generally

speaking the vaccines were incredibly successful in knocking back polio over the next few years, but there was a rocky road ahead

conspiracy theories inequities and distribution distrust of the vaccine lots of things that sound familiar.

So let's talk about this moment where the shots go into the arms and what came next with as always Nicole Hemmer of Columbia. Hello, Nicky.

Hello, Jody. And Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello Kelly. Hey there.

Nicky want to start here and maybe let's just talk about this moment. Why Pittsburgh?

Yeah, I mean it's a pretty straightforward reason. That's where Jonas Sulk was working as a

researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. And so as he's finally developing

this latest version of the vaccine, just using local kids as a way of seeing whether or not it works,

...