[JohnBovenmyer]

IIRC dispensing the injected, killed vaccine requires refrigeration be available. The oral 'attenuated' vaccine did not. So in the poor remote areas where polio had yet to be eradicated (we had gotten that down to just Afghanistan and adjacent Pakistan) it was feasible to give it in addition to being easier to convince people to take it. Once an area had been polio free long enough, and yet still had high enough vaccination rates the math said kids risk from the live vaccine were higher than the risk of out of area polio being imported to them and causing paralytic polio in spite of the (less effective) injected vaccine. Then, as was done in the US they'd stop with the live vaccine.

Polio SHOULD already be extinct with no one needing either vaccine and no one at risk for paralytic illness from the live vaccine (IIRC the risk is 1/million or maybe 1/ 3 million from it). There is one, and only one, reason polio is not extinct. The fundamentalist Islamics of Afghanistan and Pakistan who not only refused the vaccine givers but in some cases murdered them when just a little more vaccination would have finished the job. Poverty WAS NOT to blame. The even poorer areas of India had already gotten the job done. For any further cases of natural polio or of vaccine induced polio all blame goes not to big pharma, but to bad Alllah.

[DugwayDuke]

JohnBovenmyer wrote: “There is one, and only one, reason polio is not extinct. The fundamentalist Islamics of Afghanistan and Pakistan who not only refused the vaccine givers but in some cases murdered them when just a little more vaccination would have finished the job.”

A perfect example of what anti-vaxxer hysteria can produce.