the polio vaccine had doubters, too, was not 100% effective, did cause a few harmful side effects to some. idiot. NOTHING IS PERFECT...
from a 1957 magazine article-
Complicated comparisons of total and paralytic cases and of epidemics of polio from year to year would be completely unnecessary if it could be shown that children who had received complete vaccination—three polio vaccine injections at the recommended time intervals—would not be seriously attacked by this disease. Unfortunately, this is not so. In 1956 there were over one hundred vaccine failures reported from various parts of the United States. Some of these patients have had severe paralysis and at least two have died. Since there is no way of counting the number of children who had complete vaccinations by the beginning of the 1956 polio season, it is impossible to tell how important this group of cases really is in evaluating the effect of the vaccine.
The early experiments in 1954 and 1955 had already shown that the vaccine was not 100 per cent effective. In 1954, using the original Salk vaccine, the controlled field trial reported by Dr. Thomas Francis showed that the vaccine protected some children against disease from all three polio virus types, including the most common epidemic type, Type 1. In that study, one half of a group of children received polio vaccine and the other half were injected with material which looked the same but which contained no vaccine. For the important Type 1, the vaccinated group had 65 per cent fewer cases of polio than those receiving the dummy material. In 1955, when the vaccine was distributed only through State Health Departments in such states as New York and Massachusetts, it was still possible to separate the children who had been vaccinated from those who had not, and here again, the vaccine was beneficial. The decrease in paralytic cases of Type 1 varied in these studies from 80 to 75 per cent.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1957/02/how-good-is-the-polio-vaccine/303946/
