Well-intentioned decision to switch oral polio vaccines in 2016 backfired, new draft report says
Something momentous happened in the history of polio eradication in April 2016: Over a period of 2 weeks, 155 countries and territories started to use a new version of Albert Sabin’s classic oral polio vaccine (OPV) that no longer protected against one of the three types of poliovirus. Type 2 virus had been eradicated by then, and the only remaining type 2 polio cases were touched off by the live virus in the vaccine itself. Dropping the type 2 component from the vaccine would end those cases as well, the thinking went.
But “the switch,” as this global move has become known, became “an unqualified failure,” according to an unusually blunt draft report commissioned by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) that is now open for public comments. Unexpectedly, vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 has continued to circulate after the switch, paralyzing more than 3300 children. And GPEI has spent more than $1.8 billion trying to quash these outbreaks, mostly in Africa. Those numbers are certain to increase until the polio program finds a way to deal with the problem it inadvertently—and with the best of intentions—created.
“It is about time someone publicly declared the switch a failure, given the obvious management and leadership errors,” says Kimberly Thompson, who heads Kid Risk, Inc., a nonprofit that has long modeled the consequences of various polio vaccine options.