Karen Torgaly

So when they went back to Russia, both Voroshilova and Chumakov had files of Sabin's vaccine viruses in their pockets on the airplanes.

And he gave them really detailed instructions about how to make vaccine from those samples.

So they had that good start.

They also had gotten permission to use the Salk vaccine.

And there was a scientist in St.

Petersburg, it was called Leningrad at the time, who used the Salk vaccine for at least a year and tried it to see if it would stop their epidemics that were going on there.

And he had very little success with it.

Chumakov, he wanted to give the Sabin vaccine to the people because he could see that it was a superior vaccine and that it would stop the epidemics that they were in danger of having.

The difference was the Salk vaccine was injected and just got into the blood, but the Sabin vaccine was given orally and it got into the blood and the gut.

And they had discovered that polio was spread by fecal-oral route instead of by the respiratory route.

Now, Chumakov had already organized all the administering programs to give the Sabin vaccine.

And they were organizing the different health units that they had within the country that were all set.

All they had to do was get the go-ahead to do it, and they didn't have it.

There was someone who was Chumakov's superior, whose name was Boris Petrovsky, who happened to be a former friend of Chumakov's, but who began to resent him because he had sort of insulted him in front of some of their peers.

He called him an idiot for something he had said, and he never forgave Chumakov for that.

So to get permission to get the vaccine in all of Russia, Chumakov had to get Petrovsky's permission to do it.

And Petrovsky was not willing to do that.

That was very frustrating for Mikhail Chomakov.

And he didn't know how he was going to get around that problem.

But there was a system that he and Sabin sort of talked about and worked out.