During the 1950s, the inactivated polio vaccine created by Jonas Salk was made using rhesus monkeys that were infected with SV40, a monkey virus that was later linked to cancer in humans.
From 1955 to 1963, hundreds of millions of people worldwide — in North and South America, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa — received the vaccines, which at the time were heralded as a medical breakthrough.
In the archived 1956 video below, you can see a propaganda piece from that era, showing just how the ill-fated vaccine was made.
“Few back then grasped that these vaccines might also be a huge, inadvertent, uncontrolled experiment in interspecies viral transmission,” a 2004 article in The Lancet noted.
Poster Comment:
SIV 40(Simian Immunodeficiency Virus 40) was the 40th Simian virus found in the polio vaccine. It caused a surge of lung disease even in people who never smoked.