This Is How the Polio Crisis Could Spin Totally Out of Control

Polio has reappeared in the United States for the first time in a generation. On July 18, the New York State Department of Health told the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention it had detected the poliovirus, which can cause paralysis or death in a small percentage of cases, in a young adult from Rockland County outside New York City.

New York authorities subsequently detected the virus in sewage in Rockland and neighboring Orange County—evidence of transmission in the local community.

That first case prompted authorities in the U.K. and Israel to up their surveillance—they found polio too.

A polio crisis could be brewing. But despite describing polio as “one of the most feared diseases in the U.S.,” the CDC is trying to maintain total government control over testing for the poliovirus. Only the feds and certain states that already do polio testing would be equipped to monitor for the pathogen.

In withholding the testing materials and protocols, private labs—such as Massachusetts-based surveillance startup BioBot—would need to detect and track the virus, the CDC risks allowing the virus to spread unnoticed in some communities, while also limiting study of a potential outbreak.

“They want to do it themselves,” Vincent Racaniello, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University, told The Daily Beast. “Just as they wanted to control the COVID tests at the beginning of the pandemic.”

The thing is, even the CDC admits that it botched the initial response to COVID. Last week Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, told the agency’s 11,000 employees the CDC needed a top-to-bottom overhaul. “To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications,” Walensky said.

The CDC might be about to repeat some of its mistakes. Amy Kirby, an Emory University epidemiologist who heads the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System, did not respond to a request for comment.

The poliovirus spreads through direct contact with fecal matter. Before the invention of an oral vaccine in the early 1950s and a sweeping campaign of childhood vaccinations, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis in the U.S. alone every year.

Vaccines squashed polio. By the 1970s, the disease had virtually disappeared from all but a handful of the poorest and most remote countries such as Afghanistan. When it reappeared, it was usually as a result of international travel—and local health authorities quickly isolated the infected and halted further spread.

The CDC tracked the poliovirus in a U.S. community just once between 1979 and 2022. In 2005, the Minnesota Department of Health identified poliovirus in an unvaccinated infant girl in a largely unvaccinated Amish community. Three other kids got sick before the virus was contained.