Polio and Other Chemical-Poisoning Diseases

How Western medicine barks up the wrong trees

In addition to my Substack posts, in the past week I made a series of posts in my forum that summarized Forrest Maready’s masterpiece on polio, titled The Moth in the Iron Lung. This is far from a new topic for me. I made a post on polio and AIDS, which are almost certainly diseases from chemical poisoning that are blamed on viruses. I previously summarized a chapter on polio in Turtles All the Way Down, and have written about the polio vaccine since the 1990s, when I learned that the CDC admitted that in the 1970s and 1980s nearly all polio cases in the USA were caused by the polio vaccine.

A short summary of Maready’s book is in order. I have long written on the “heroic medicine” of Benjamin Rush’s time, when mercury and bloodletting were cure-alls. George Washington was bled to death by the “medicine” of the day. Rush’s panacea was calomel, which was a bowel evacuant with mercury in it. The idea was that if patients survived the treatment, they would also overcome their illness. Calomel was used as “medicine” until my lifetime. Maready noted how infants were given mercury while they were teething, and as early as early as 1835 in England, paralyzed infants were noted. A German doctor noted the same in 1840, and for the next 50 years, reports of infant paralysis were scattered through the medical literature, but nobody implicated mercury.

Big Pharma got its start by vending calomel to the troops in the Civil War, and the age of proprietary “medicine” began, with its secret ingredients. The real healers, which included herbalists, midwives, and homeopaths, were under siege by orthodox medicine in those days, led by the AMA and later, robber barons, especially John D. Rockefeller, whose personal physician was a homeopath.

As the USA completed its theft of temperate North America, its monoculture farms began attracting “pests” such as the potato beetle, and an arsenic-based paint called Paris green began its use to combat that beetle. Scientists began noticing arsenic poisoning in those days. Arsenic was known to be toxic for millennia, so it is strange that it found such widespread use in the industrializing world.

During the Civil War, Northerners could not obtain Southern cotton, so silk came into demand. A scientist from France who immigrated to the USA in 1856 began experimenting with gypsy moths, to crossbreed them with silk moths and create an American variety of silk. The Civil War’s end dashed his silk dreams. In 1869, he inadvertently let his moths escape, and by 1892, the gypsy moth had denuded 200 square miles of Boston and vicinity.

While Paris green was highly toxic, it easily washed off foliage so had limited effectiveness, and the potato beetle had reached the East Coast from the West in 1874. Boston formed a commission to combat the gypsy moth, and a scientist who worked for the commission invented lead arsenate, which became a miracle pesticide in 1893, which is when cases of infant paralysis began to skyrocket in Boston. The term polio meant paralysis, and had nothing to do with the polio virus then.

But the first big outbreak of what we now call polio happened in 1894 in a farming town in Vermont. The farmers there had heard about the miracle pesticide and began liberally spraying it on their crops, mostly fruits and vegetables, and 123 people got polio and 18 died that summer. But their symptoms were consistent with arsenic poisoning, which the medical literature was familiar with. But nobody put together the new pesticide and the new disease, incredibly.

Lead arsenate was so successful on insects that states began mandating its use. Wherever lead arsenate was used, polio began breaking out, and armed with their new germ theory of disease, scientists quested after the microbe that caused the polio cases.

The public began to suspect a connection, but scientists working for industry and corrupt officials denied any connection, in a classic case of what Ed Herman would come to call junk science. Most of the early polio outbreaks happened in rural areas that had been sprayed with lead arsenate, but the contaminated food supply began to cause polio outbreaks in cities.

In 1921 two key events in the history of polio happened: Franklin Roosevelt got polio, and for the first time, lead arsenate was rained on crops from airplanes. Roosevelt’s symptoms were consistent with poisoning, not so-called polio, and crop dusting soon took the nation by storm. In the 1920s, what we call the iron lung was first used on a polio victim.

But in the 1930s, books began to be published on the hazards of lead arsenate, while scientists slaughtered tens of thousands of rhesus monkeys in barbaric experiments in their quest for a polio vaccine. Some vaccines were tried in the 1930s, but they killed dozens of children so their use stopped. It was not until the late 1930s that officialdom finally admitted that lead arsenate was toxic and it began to be phased out. In the 1920s, lead was added to gasoline, purely for profit reasons, and lead was defended by industrial-funded scientists and corrupt officials. The EPA eventually estimated 5,000 American deaths per year from lead poisoning before lead was banned from gasoline.

Lead arsenate soon made way for another miracle pesticide: DDT. Its ability to kill insects was noted in 1939, it saw heavy use in World War II, and American soldiers “coincidentally” began to become paralyzed in their DDT-soaked barracks. The USA was bathed in a cloud of DDT after World War II, and polio skyrocketed to its peak year in 1952 (at least in its DDT phase – about 8,000 died in 1916, for instance), when more than 3,000 Americans died.

Once again, people began suspecting a connection between DDT and the rash of polio, but industry-funded scientists and corrupt officials denied it. What ended DDT was not an acknowledgment that it was killing humans, but the “pests” became immune to it, DDT’s use collapsed, and “coincidentally” so did polio cases. By the time that the Salk and Sabin vaccines came out, polio had already largely disappeared from the USA. But to this day, polio is mentioned in the same breath as the heroic efforts by Salk, Sabin, and friends, who conquered polio with their miraculous vaccines.

This playbook has been used many times, as newcomers take credit for a war that was already won. Measles deaths in England had declined by 99.96% before the measles vaccine was introduced. When that vaccine was introduced, measles was considered a harmless mild childhood disease in the USA, but today, measles outbreaks are accompanied by hysteria. That strange change has never been addressed by the vaccine establishment that I know of. How could they? It is another one of the elephants in the room.

At the same time that DDT began its decline, fluoride had completed its makeover from hazardous industrial waste to compulsory “medicine,” and the Journal of the American Medical Association was filled with cigarette ads that made health claims, which made the journal’s editor, who was the face of American medicine, a rich man. Such heroic times.

As Ed Herman wrote, even after exposure, the myths live on in the USA. We’ll see what kind of dent Kennedy can make.