What the apologists for the Salk vaccine regurgitate from a common script (… some might say scripture) is that before the vaccine was introduced and tested on one million children - the so-called "Polio Pioneers"- in 19542 more than 50,000 people in the U.S. were contracting polio each year, and that by the end of the 1950s the numbers were down to less than 10,000.3 Ergo, the Salk vaccine saved the U.S. from polio. Open and shut case.