Polio and the IPV vs OPV Vaccine

There are two different types of vaccines used to prevent Polio which are the IPV and OPV vaccine. The IPV is the inactive vaccine that is given by a shot in the leg or arm and is the only vaccine used within the United States now. The article says the OPV is the oral vaccine which is attenuated and is no longer used within the United States since 2000 to stop the risk of vaccine-derived polio. I had no idea before we started talking about the Polio vaccine in class that there was ever an OPV and thought that it was always given as a shot in the arm. I was also quite shocked that even though the original OPV vaccine stopped most polio infections that it was still causing some to occur because I have never heard of a vaccine being the cause of the virus it is protecting against.

When I was reading about the OPV from the first article I saw that some other countries still use it as their main vaccine. I found that during 2019 there was a slight outbreak of polio that came from the OPV vaccine causing vaccine-derived polio which then resulted in under-immunized populations becoming infected. The article talks about how this is less common in populations with a high immunity rate and that once polio is eradicated then these types of outbreaks will stop happening. What I found to be strange was that the outbreaks are coming from people who are accidentally getting the disease from the oral vaccine but the countries are not looking into the IPV vaccine to stop this from happening. These countries are instead relying on herd immunity for protection in case of an accidental case of polio from OPV when they could be using the IPV and herd immunity to protect infants in countries such as the United States.

I was also curious about polio in general because I did not realize that it was not eradicated completely from the world like smallpox. Out of the three polio wild type strains there is only one that is still circulating while the other two were eradicated in 1999 and 2012. This article says that many people are suggesting that the WHO should convert their efforts into just controlling the polio virus and to stop trying to eradicate it. The article says that some people think the virus will never be eradicated and that we should instead put the money and efforts into other healthcare issues. This is quite shocking that people are okay with the polio virus still existing when once it is eradicated then it will never resurface and cause harm like the smallpox virus. I think that effort should still be put into eradicating it because I don’t want to live in a world where any children could end up with this awful disease.