[4] Surgeon General Scheele sent William Tripp and Karl Habel from the NIH to inspect Cutter's Berkeley facilities, question workers, and examine records.
[5] A congressional hearing in June 1955 concluded that the problem was primarily the lack of scrutiny from the NIH Laboratory of Biologics Control (and its excessive trust in the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis reports).
[6] The jury found Cutter not negligent, but liable for breach of implied warranty, and awarded the plaintiffs monetary damages.
All five companies that produced the Salk vaccine in 1955—Eli Lilly, Parke-Davis, Wyeth, Pitman-Moore, and Cutter—had difficulty completely inactivating the polio virus.
[7] The Cutter incident was one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in US history, and exposed several thousand children to live polio virus on vaccination.
[3] The NIH Laboratory of Biologics Control, which had certified the Cutter polio vaccine, had received advance warnings of problems: in 1954, staff member Bernice Eddy had reported to her superiors that some inoculated monkeys had become paralyzed and provided photographs.
[1] In the late 1970s through 1980s, numerous companies, including Bayer's Cutter Biologic division, produced unsafe blood products to treat hemophilia.