“Regretfully, the story of polio vaccine was not without tragedy. In April 1955, soon after mass polio vaccination began in the United States, reports trickled in to the Surgeon General concerning atypical cases of paralytic polio. Several paralytic polio cases were reported in California in patients who had received the polio vaccine about a week earlier but the paralysis only affected the arm or leg in which they received the injection. Each of these cases occurred in polio vaccine produced by Cutter pharmaceutical company. The Surgeon General immediately pulled all Cutter polio vaccine, but it was too late; nearly 400,000 children had been inoculated with Cutter polio vaccine and 250 cases of atypical paralytic polio occurred. There were also reports of the Wyeth pharmaceutical company polio vaccine causing paralysis and death in several children in the northeastern United States.” 

Clinical and Translational Science 2010