“On April 26, 1954, [70+1 years, -1 day ago] six-year-old Randy Kerr was injected with the Salk vaccine at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. By the end of June, an unprecedented 1.8 million people, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, joined him in becoming “polio pioneers.” For the first time, researchers used the double-blind method, now standard, in which neither the patient nor person administering the inoculation knew if it was a vaccine or placebo. Although no one was certain that the vaccine was perfectly safe—in fact, Sabin argued it would cause more cases of polio than it would prevent—there was no shortage of volunteers.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
Re the first one–very funny comedian Martha Chavez, who has been in Canada for over 20 years but hails originally from Nicaragua, has a bit about how she eagerly took the COVID vaccine because it was being distributed first to the wealthy countries instead of being tested on the poor ones, and thus TPTB must have been sure it was safe. Kinda stings, like the cartoon…
I remember standing in line, with my whole family, to get the oral polio vaccine. The line stretched around all four sides of the building. Nobody wanted to miss out. Everybody knew somebody who had polio, and they had the sense to recognize the vaccine as a help, not a harm.
1) Now we have cartoon characters in charge of healthcare
2) Thanks for the Martha Chavez mention. I enjoyed her standup but had forgotten her name.
We got the polio vaccine on sugar cubes at school.
I recall an episode of the show Northern Exposure, where Dr. Joel gets involved in a double-blind test. Character “Ed” is assisting, and manages to spill both containers of pills onto the floor. He scoops up the now mixed pills into the two containers at random.
The 1957 Pulitzer prize for Editorial Cartooning was awarded to Tom Little of the Nashville Tennessean newspaper for his cartoon of 12 Jan 1956 depicting a polio-afflicted boy asking why his parent’s hadn’t given him the Salk vaccine while he watches his classmates playing a game of football on the playground. History sometimes repeats itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wonder_Why_My_Parents_Didn%27t_Give_Me_Salk_Shots%3F.jpg
Chak – We went to a local elementary school’s gym to get the Sabin (oral) polio vaccine. The line went out the door into the hall. My sister was very young at the time and did not get the vaccine on a sugar cube as I did – they shot into her mouth with a dropper to make sure that all went into her.