Richard Mulvaney, first doctor to give polio vaccine in US

WASHINGTON -- Richard Joseph Mulvaney -- a McLean, Va., physician who was the first doctor in the nation to give children the Salk polio vaccine, which virtually ended the crippling disease in the United States -- died Oct. 26 of congestive heart failure at Inova Fairfax Hospital. He was 88.

Dr. Mulvaney, McLean's first general practitioner, conducted the field test of the vaccine after other health departments shied away from the trial, intimidated by opposition from the influential broadcaster Walter Winchell.

"I remember walking in and not realizing what a tremendous thing it was until I stepped over radio wires and TV wires," he said in 2004. "I remember kids standing off to the side looking worried and screaming."

The disease typically struck in early summer, sometimes crippling or killing its victims. In 1952, a particularly bad year, 57,628 new cases of polio were reported. When Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh developed an effective killed-virus version of the vaccine, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes) chose Thomas Francis Jr. at the University of Michigan to implement the first mass polio vaccine trial in 1954. Dr. Mulvaney was the first of the volunteers to begin carrying out the work.

His first patient was 6-year-old Randy Kerr of Falls Church, Va., a gritty youngster with poison ivy who had begged his parents to let him be the first to get the shot.

By 1955, the number of new polio cases dropped dramatically, to 29,270.

The oral vaccine, developed by Albert Sabin, was licensed in 1962, and polio became a disease of the past, at least in the United States, which saw its last wild virus in 1979.