Moscow: To the boys, it was just a sugary treat. To their parents, prominent medical researchers, what happened in their Moscow apartment that day in 1959 was a vital experiment with countless lives at stake - and their own children as guinea pigs.
“We formed a kind of line,” Dr. Peter Chumakov, who was 7 at the time, recalled in an interview. Into each waiting mouth, a parent popped a sugar cube laced with weakened poliovirus - an early
vaccine against a dreaded disease. “I was eating it from the hands of my mother.” Today, that same vaccine is gaining renewed attention from researchers — including those brothers, who all grew up to be virologists — as a possible weapon against the new
coronavirus, based in part on research done by their mother, Dr. Marina Voroshilova.
Voroshilova established that the live polio vaccine had an unexpected benefit that, it turns out, could be relevant to the current pandemic: People who got the vaccine did not become sick with other viral illnesses for a month or so afterward. She took to giving the boys polio vaccine each fall as protection against flu.
Now some scientists in several countries are taking a keen interest in the idea of repurposing existing vaccines, like the one with live poliovirus and another for
tuberculosis, to see if they can provide at least temporary resistance to the coronavirus. Russians are among them, drawing on a long history of vaccine research — and of researchers, unconcerned about being scoffed at as mad scientists, experimenting on themselves.
Experts advise that the idea — like many other proposed ways of attacking the pandemic — must be approached with great caution. “We are much better off with a vaccine that induces specific immunity,” Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of a vaccine against the
rotavirus and professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the
University of Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview. Any benefits from a repurposed vaccine, he said, are “much shorter-lived and incomplete” compared with a tailored vaccine.
And there are risks. Billions of people have taken live poliovirus vaccine, nearly eradicating the disease. However, in extremely rare cases, the weakened virus used in the vaccine can mutate into a more dangerous form, cause polio and infect other people. The risk of paralysis is estimated at 1in 2.7 million vaccinations.