" Then, in 1955, the Salk vaccine was licensed. Porter watched in amazement and anger as several of his Christian Science classmates refused to get it. He thought of what the vaccine would have meant to his father’s life, and he cut his ties with the church. “That is not what I would call moral thinking,” he says. The polio vaccine’s success was profound. In 1952, the year Jonas Salk first began to test it in humans, the United States had 57,879 cases. By 1957, two years after the vaccine was approved for broad use, the number had fallen to 5,485, and by 1964 it was 122. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It