A Brief Overview on the Horrors of Polio Research

When you look into the history of Polio, you will find that the “discovery” of the Polio “virus” is fraught with insane leaps in logic and assumptions and is replete with grotesquely inhumane experiments. You will find that initially, the spinal column from a deceased nine-year-old boy was ground up and injected directly into the stomachs of monkeys. Eventually, this led to further experiments where ground up monkey brains were injected into the craniums of other monkeys. If the action of injecting unpurified brain matter into the cerebellum of healthy monkeys caused paralysis, the researchers would claim success. This process of grinding up brain and spinal material and injecting the unpurified concoction into various parts of different animals persisted for decades. All the while, no “virus” was ever properly purified/isolated from any sick human nor animal but was only assumed by the researchers to be within the ground up animal tissue mixtures being injected and passed on from animal to animal. Not once did they question whether the action of injecting toxins into the brains of animals was the cause of sickness/paralysis rather than any invisible “virus” assumed to be present. Not once did they perform proper controls to verify the accuracy of their findings. What followed was decades of disgusting horrors perpetrated on various animals and eventually on humans in the form of vaccines.

Below are two sources which provide a bit more detail as well as a nice overview of the Polio madness that gripped the early part of the 20th century:

Milestones in Early Poliomyelitis Research (1840 to 1949)

“The history of the etiology of poliomyelitis is a history of errors. I mention only the “coccus era,” when several investigators were prejudiced by a supposed parallelism between poliomyelitis and meningitis epidemica.

However, all in all, bacteriological findings were negative; likewise, attempts to transmit the disease to the usual laboratory animals, such as rabbits, guinea pigs, or mice, failed. Landsteiner and Popper (14) injected intraperitoneally into two Old World monkeys (Cynocephalus hamadryas and Macacus rhesus) a suspension of spinal cord from a 9-year-old boy who had succumbed to severe poliomyelitis after four days of illness. The two monkeys, in good condition, had been available from previous experiments with syphilis. The inoculated material, which was bacteriologically sterile, yielded negative results when injected into rabbits, guinea pigs, and mice. The two monkeys, however, exhibited lesions in the spinal cord, medulla, pons, and brain stem that were indistinguishable from those observed in cases of human poliomyelitis. One of the monkeys, the rhesus monkey, developed complete flaccid paralysis of both legs. Landsteiner and Popper were unable to passage the agent, but this was achieved soon afterward and independently in 1909 by Römer (22), Flexner and Lewis (8), Leiner and von Wiesner (15), and Landsteiner and Levaditi (13).”

“In this context it should be mentioned that Max Theiler (quoted by Paul [20])—in analogy to his work on yellow fever—performed more than 150 mouse passages of the Lansing strain and observed a dramatic attenuation—a term used first by John Kolmer of Philadelphia in connection with poliomyelitis vaccines—of the virus after intracerebral inoculation of monkeys with results of from 100 to 0% paralysis.“

“There were attempts as early as 1913 by Constantin Levaditi (16) to replicate poliovirus in tissue culture. But as Sabin and Olitsky (25) stated in their famous paper of 1936, “there is no unequivocal evidence that the virus of poliomyelitis has as yet been successfully cultivated outside the body.”

Sabin and Olitsky used various carefully dissected tissues of 3- to 4-month-old human embryos, e.g., brain and cord, lungs, kidney, liver, and spleen. The virus was the already mentioned MV (mixed virus) strain of the Rockefeller Institute, a virus mixture prepared by H. L. Amoss in 1914 and kept for decades through numerous intracerebral passages in monkeys (23). The authors found that the virus multiplied readily only in the presence of nervous tissue, as evidenced by experiments with monkeys, including neutralization tests. The experiment appeared interesting at the time but of no practical value.

Despite this depressing failure and in view of the mounting evidence of the extraneural multiplication of poliovirus (see above), John Enders and his young collaborators Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins made further attempts to cultivate poliovirus in vitro, in particular after Weller’s successful cultivation of mumps virus in vitro. Enders and coworkers (7) demonstrated the dramatic replication of Lansing virus (testable in mice) in human embryonic cultures composed chiefly of skin, muscle, and connective tissue from the arms and legs, in cultures of human embryonic intestine, and in those of nervous tissue. It was Robbins who first recognized differences in cell morphology between inoculated and uninoculated cultures (24a). Enders coined the term cytopathic effects (CPE).“

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC112492/#!po=45.8333

The above passage gives a general overview of the horrific methods used to try and prove a Polio “virus” existed. The history of Polio research includes the devastatingly cruel treatment of animals, the macabre use of spinal tissue from a deceased nine-year-old, along with insane leaps in logic and the assumptions of invisible “viruses” as the cause of experimentally created disease from drilling holes into the heads of monkeys.

These horrors are further highlighted in this next section from the amazing book Virus Mania by Torsten Engelbrecht. It presents a great summary of why these experiments fail to prove Polio as an infectious “virus:”

“Landsteiner and Popper instead chose to take a diseased piece of spinal marrow from a lame nine-year-old boy, chopped it up, dissolved it in water and injected one or two whole cups intraperitoneally (into the abdominal cavities) of two test monkeys: one died and the other became permanently paralyzed. Their studies were plagued by a mind-boggling range of basic problems. First, the “glop” they poured into the animals was not even infectious, since the paralysis didn’t appear in the monkeys and guinea pigs given the alleged “virus soup” to drink, or in those that had it injected into their extremities.

Shortly after, researchers Simon Flexner and Paul Lewis experimented with a comparable mixture, injecting this into monkeys brains. Next, they brewed a new soup from the brains of these monkeys and put the mix into another monkey’s head. This monkey did indeed become ill. In 1911, Flexner even boasted in a press release, that they had already found out how polio could be prevented, adding, of course, that they were close to developing a cure.

But this experiment shows no proof of a viral infection. The glop used cannot be termed an isolated virus, even with all the will in the world. Nobody could have seen any virus, as the electron microscope wasn’t invented until 1931. Also, Flexner and Lewis did not disclose the ingredients of their “injection soup.” By 1948, it was still unknown “how the polio virus invades humans,” as expert John Paul of Yale University stated at an international poliomyelitis congress in New York City. Apart from that, it is very probable that the injection of foreign tissues in the monkeys craniums triggered their Polio-like symptoms (seeChapter 5: BSE). And when one considers the amount of injected material, it can hardly be surprising that the animals became ill. Controlled trials weren’t even carried out—that is, they neglected to inject a control group of monkeys with healthy spinal cord tissue. Neither were the effects of chemical toxins like heavy metals injected directly into the brain. All of these factors make the experiments virtually worthless.”

-Virus Mania

In summary:

• The history of the etiology of poliomyelitis is a history of errors
• Early attempts to transmit the disease to the usual laboratory animals, such as rabbits, guinea pigs, or mice, failed
• Landsteiner and Popper injected intraperitoneally (in the stomach) into two Old World monkeys (Cynocephalus hamadryas and Macacus rhesus) a suspension of spinal cord from a 9-year-old boy who had succumbed to severe poliomyelitis after four days of illness
• The inoculated material yielded negative results when injected into rabbits, guinea pigs, and mice
• Landsteiner and Popper were unable to passage the agent
• Max Theiler performed more than 150 mouse passages of the Lansing strain and observed a dramatic attenuation of the “virus” after intracerebral inoculation of monkeys with results of from 100 to 0% paralysis
• Sabin and Olitsky stated in their famous paper of 1936, “there is no unequivocal evidence that the virus of poliomyelitis has as yet been successfully cultivated outside the body.”
• Sabin and Olitsky used various carefully dissected tissues of 3- to 4-month-old human embryos, e.g., brain and cord, lungs, kidney, liver, and spleen
• The “virus” they used was the MV (mixed “virus”) strain of the Rockefeller Institute, a “virus” mixture prepared by H. L. Amoss in 1914 and kept for decades through numerous intracerebral passages in monkeys
• Their experiment appeared interesting at the time but of no practical value
• John Enders (of Measles fame) “demonstrated” the replication of Lansing “virus” in human embryonic cultures composed chiefly of skin, muscle, and connective tissue from the arms and legs, in cultures of human embryonic intestine, and in those of nervous tissue which he later termed CPE
• The unpurified glop originally used by Landsteiner and Popper was non-infectious since the paralysis didn’t appear in the monkeys and guinea pigs given the alleged “virus soup” to drink, or in those that had it injected into their extremities
• In 1910, Simon Flexner and Paul Lewis brewed a new soup from the brains of monkeys and put the mix into another monkey’s head and claimed isolation of the “virus”
• However, nobody could have seen any “virus,” as the electron microscope wasn’t invented until 1931
• Flexner and Lewis did not disclose the ingredients of their “injection soup“
• No control experiments were carried out

It’s clear that the Polio researchers were not attempting to find a “virus” but rather to see if they could create experimental paralysis from these horrific trials. No Polio “virus” was ever properly purified/isolated directly from a sick patient nor proven pathogenic. All they did was grind up spinal tissues of deceased children, mixed these remains with chemicals/additives, and injected these unpurified brews into the brains and extremities of animals. They would then kill the animals who became sick, grind up their brains/spinal tissues, and inject these concoctions into either the same or even different species of animals. It was through this process of grinding up tissues and injecting the tissue soup over and over again (called passaging) that the researchers claimed a Polio “virus” was kept alive and serially transferred throughout decades without ever actually isolating or even seeing an actual Polio “virus.” The Polio “history of errors” and sadistic practices utilized to “prove” an invisible “virus,” is a nice summation of the sad unscientific state of virology.