Opinion: The infamous 'Cutter vaccine' changed my family forever — but we still support vaccination

If anyone should have lobbied against the use of vaccines in this country, it was my family.

My Aunt Jean, my father’s older sister, was a victim of the infamous Cutter vaccine, an early variant of the polio vaccine presumed to contain an inactivated version of the live virus. Except that it wasn’t inactive. Some 200,000 children in Western and Midwestern states received that vaccine in the spring of 1955. That number included three of my cousins — Aunt Jean’s children. The dosages had been administered by my father, then chief resident at Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley, California. His father, my grandfather, was then the hospital’s chief administrator. The vaccine had been offered to the young members of the families of health care workers, and so my cousins lined up and were inoculated.

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