00:00 Polio was almost eradicated thanks to a successful vaccination campaign, with only three countries still experiencing endemic cases.

04:41 Polio went from being a global problem to only affecting three countries, and we were close to eradicating it completely.

09:38 Polio is a devastating disease that can cause paralysis and death, and there is currently no cure for it.

14:30 Polio is an ancient disease with uncertain origins, but it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that there was a sense of urgency to find a cure due to outbreaks caused by urbanization and better sanitation.

19:53 Improved sanitation led to a decrease in the number of people showing signs or symptoms of polio, but without a vaccine program, the virus was able to spread rapidly, causing panic and outbreaks in the early 20th century.

24:52 Despite previous setbacks and risks, a combination of weakened and inactivated polio vaccines has come close to eradicating polio, with a massive PR campaign in 1954 leading to the vaccination of a million children, although there were still cases of polio and deaths resulting from the vaccine.

30:08 The inactivated polio virus vaccine, known as IPV, was developed and administered to children in the 1950s to prevent the virus from reaching the central nervous system, despite not preventing the infection itself.

35:44 The oral polio virus vaccine (OPV) became the standard in the United States from the early 1960s to 2000 due to its advantages over the inactivated polio virus vaccine (IPV), such as lower cost and the ability to vaccinate against all three serotypes on one sugar cube, but it had major problems, including the risk of contracting polio and the possibility of the vaccine strain mutating and becoming more infectious or deadly.

40:42 Researchers discovered a way to reduce the cost of the inactivated polio virus vaccine (IPV) by growing the polio virus on cultured monkey kidney cells, eliminating the need to import thousands of monkeys and significantly reducing expenses.

45:43 The CIA's use of a fake vaccination campaign during the hunt for Osama bin Laden undermined trust in vaccination campaigns and set the eradication campaign for polio back by decades.