Cold War tensions and the polio vaccine Sabin vaccine from the Soviet side. However other Soviet virologists argued that the Salk vaccine could be considered safe, since the Americans tested it on their own people. They considered that the Sabin vaccine must be potentially dangerous because the Americans did not wish to test it on their own society. The documented achievement of the Sabin-Chumakov collaboration eventually trumped the ideological differences of the Cold War. Their oral live-virus vaccine became federally licensed in 1962, and used for over three decades to help eliminate polio globally, replacing the Salk vaccine. Using these vaccines, the threat of polio remains only
Jonas Salk got in. During his years at New York University Medical School, Salk worked as a laboratory technician during the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer. During Salk's medical studies, he stood out from his peers, according to Bookchin, "not just because of his continued academic prowess—he was Alpha Omega Alpha, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of medical education—but because he had decided he did not want to practice medicine." Instead, he became absorbed in research, even taking a year off to study biochemistry. He later focused more of his studies on bacteriology which had replaced medicine