There’s no compelling reason to believe the vaccine was relevant to the disappearance of polio, or at least was the major factor.

Before the polio vaccine, Doctors used to routinely call any childhood paralysis polio. It played well on insurance forms. Here’s an analysis of the Detroit polio epidemic of 1958.http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=327642 They had a big epidemic, but when they went in and examined the cases, it turned out that less than 1/3 of the patients even had polio virus, and whether it is what was causing their problem is of course even then unclear. Maybe they would have beat it easy without some other factor (eg DDT).
So how did the polio vaccine stop a disease where at least 2/3 of the cases didn’t have the virus? It seems plausible that most polio cases back in the day were mostly or entirely DDT poisoning. Polio is normally a very mild disease. DDT exposure makes you more vulnerable.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4285235 Rich people used to spray DDT around to keep bugs away, prevent polio. In so doing, some gave their kids polio, much like parents today, thinking to protect their kids, are vaccinating them and making them sick.

No American has gotten polio in 30 years, yet hundreds of millions of kids have gotten polio shots. Statistically, those shots damaged and likely killed many many kids. Almost nobody who gets polio even has symptoms. Its normally a very mild disease. I’ve seen estimates of the fraction who are symptomatic at all ranging from 1/20 to 1/200, but even those who have symptoms usually make a full recovery. Right now, normal US kids getting the vaccine series have a 6/1000 chance of dying as an infant and a chance approaching 1/25 of getting autism, and maybe over 1/2 of getting some chronic problem like peanut allergy, obesity, autoimmune disease, ADHD, depression, diabetes, damaged immune system etc etc. all of which are epidemic and increased greatly as the vaccine schedule was increased and all of which are tied by scientific papers to vaccines. When you see the boys failing in the schools, you shouldn’t forget that many of the animal experiments show injections damage male models more than female.

One also shouldn’t forget that the polio vaccine was contaminated with other live and contagious viruses including SV-40, which was believed then and is believed now to cause cancer, and quite likely Simian HIV. The vaccine was made from pus from monkeys that were diseased because they were kept in cages in close proximity to each other, and passed around epidemics. This reference reports that polio vaccine was still contaminated with SV-40 as recently as 1978: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16288015
Merck Chief Scientist Discusses on Video How SV-40 was knowingly administered in polio vaccines although it was understood to likely cause cancer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13QiSV_lrDQ
The polio vaccine is a very plausibly source of HIV in humanity. There are various stray retroviruses and the like in vaccines to this day. http://www.virology.ws/2010/03/29/deep-sequencing-reveals-viral-vaccine-contaminants/

Also, its worth noting again that every single scientific paper comparing kids or animals that had more injections or more injected aluminum to ones who had less injections or aluminum, finds more causes damage and less is healthier (with the exception of a few papers with ridiculous methodological problems I discussed in post 1.) The paper the CDC or the Pediatricians sometimes cite as comparing more vaccines to less and finding no damage, De Stefano et al, if you read it doesn’t do anything of the kind, it effectively compares patients who got DTP and dozens of vaxes to patients who may have got DTaP but didn’t get DTP and got dozens of others. Literally every single animal result and every single epidemiological result I’ve ever found in the scientific literature shows comparing more to less vaccines, more vaccines do damage. If you think I’m wrong, please cite a paper contradicting me.
Media, stop lying to us and tell us the truth. The scientific literature does not say what you are pretending it does. You are ignoring all the papers that are actually relevant and focusing on papers that don’t measure anything useful but pretend they do.

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NOTE ADDED: Hey, I just found this (which was just published):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25690930
which concludes:
“This comprehensive five-year, case-control study, which closely examined the effects of pediatric vaccines on early primate development, provided no consistent evidence of neurodevelopmental deficits or aberrant behavior in vaccinated animals.”
However, we also find this comment at the pubmed page:

Dan Laks2015 Feb 20 10:31 p.m. (4 days ago)edited 0 of 2 people found this helpful

The CDC has two different terms. Vaccine Efficacy is measured using a double blind randomized placebo test.
If the people who got the vaccine got the targeted disease 20 times less than the people who got the placebo, then the vaccine efficacy would be 95%. Getting the vaccine seems to make you 20 times less likely to get the disease than you would if you’d got a placebo.

Vaccine Effectiveness is what they usually talk to you about.
Here’s how they often measure vaccine effectiveness, especially I’ve noticed for flu vaccines. “Vaccine effectiveness was estimated as 100% x (1 – odds ratio [ratio of odds of being vaccinated among outpatients with influenza-positive test results to the odds of being vaccinated among outpatients with influenza-negative test results])” http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6401a4.htm
In other words, they take people presenting to the Doc for a respiratory illness and divide them up into 4 groups, first by whether they got the flu vax, and second by whether they have the flu or some other respiratory complaint. Let VF be the guys who were vaxed and have flu,  VI be the guys who were vaxed and have some other respiratory infection, NF be guys who weren’t vaxed and have flu, and NI be guys who weren’t vaxed and have some other respiratory infection.
Vaccine Effectiveness = 100% X (1-(VF/NF)(NI/VI))

Now the obvious problem with this is, you get a high Vaccine Effectiveness if a lot of people who get the flu vaccine get sick with other respiratory illnesses, independent of whether it helps with the flu. There are three problems with this.

(1) This formula seems likely to generate a substantial VE even if the vaccine were actually a placebo. It seems very plausible that people who are likely to go to the Doctor with a respiratory illness are more likely to get Vaxed for flu, either because they are more reliant on doctors, more hypochondriac, or genuinely sicklier. People who never get colds are unlikely to go for flu shots. On the other hand, when they actually get the flu, they’ll come in. If many vaccinees are coming in with imagined or minor respiratory complaints and non-vaccinees are not, that would generate a good vaccine effectiveness for a placebo. etc.

(2) Even more importantly, a flu vaccine will get a high effectiveness rating if it causes recipients to get a lot of non-flu respiratory illnesses by damaging their immune system. If the only effect a flu vaccine had was to cause recipients to get 4 times as many non-flu respiratory illnesses as placebo recipients, then you would find a vaccine effectiveness of 75%.
If a flu vaccine made you twice as likely to get the flu and 4 times as likely to get another respiratory illness, you would find a Vaccine Effectiveness of 50%.

By a striking coincidence, vaccine recipients getting 4 times as many respiratory illnesses as placebo recipients is what was reported in the only Randomized placebo control of a flu vaccine that followed the health for more than a few months that I’ve ever seen.   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22423139
Of course, since this landmark placebo controlled study, not only have I not seen it repeated with other flu vaccines, I also haven’t seen the authorities question measures of vaccine effectiveness which would only conceivably make sense if the vaccine were already known not to be doing damage.

There is also a consistent case in both human and animal studies reporting that flu vaccines damage CD 8+ T cells and harm immunity to other diseases than the vaxed. Vaxed animals died from diseases the placebo animals fought off.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21880755
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20335492
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19440239

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22525386 Children seen at the Mayo Clinic for flu 1996-2006 were 3 times as likely to be hospitalized if they had had a flu shot as not.

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000258 Association between the 2008–09 Seasonal Influenza Vaccine and Pandemic H1N1 Illness during Spring–Summer 2009: Four Observational Studies from Canada

(3) The second law of thermodynamics says its a lot easier to screw things up then to fix them. If vaccine makers are being rewarded for screwing up immune systems, you can bet they’ll figure out how, especially if they are indemnified against any damage they cause. Even if they have the best of intentions. Getting a vaccine that protects against a specific flu strain you can’t even predict easily, without in the process screwing up the immune system or the health of the recipient, that’s an incredibly hard project. I don’t believe anybody is even capable of it. Getting an injection that screws up the immune system so recipients get more respiratory illnesses? You could probably do that pretty quick by trial and error. When you blundered into it, you’d get rich and everybody would tell you you were a genius and saving mankind.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. “– Marcia Angel
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/

I’ve blogged a lot on vaccines here, but I think the Crowd Think Phenomenon in Medicine goes way beyond vaccines.
Everybody who’s seriously looked into it, finds that at most 10-30% of western medicine has a scientific basis.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-larry-dossey/the-mythology-of-science_b_412475.html

Then we have studies like this:
Clin Oncol (R Coll Radiol). 2004 Dec;16(8):549-60.
The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies.
Morgan G1, Ward R, Barton M.
RESULTS: The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15630849

And we have a recent article from the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
They reviewed all the articles published for 10 years in a high impact journal. The majority of the articles surveyed study a new practice, but of the 27% that test an existing practice, 40% reverse the practice and 38% reaffirm. My remark on this is: 50%-50% would be what you’d expect if the result of the test were random. So this indicates they are doing no better than random in introducing new practices replacing old ones. If you go on a random walk with each step forward or backward, how long does it take before you know nothing?
http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196%2813%2900405-9/abstract

IMO, Modern medicine seems mostly the result of crowd think decisions under the positive reinforcement stimulus of money. It built a cargo cult science to pretend it is scientific, and uses this to justify decisions made largely to maximize money. The participants don’t consciously understand this, but its the crowd think result. It’s exactly what you should expect to see result from randomized medical decision making, which the Mayo Clinic study showed they make, positive money reinforcement learning, which even snails are capable of, and crowd think dynamics.

Interestingly, on the other hand, the naturopaths I read or talk to, are attempting to do actual science. They read and cite the actual scientific literature. They also have a healthy pre-disposition to consider remedies that are natural and have histories of human consumption are thus pretty clearly not very toxic, thus paying attention to “first do no harm”. Not only that, almost all the remedies they consider are readily available and not expensive. In general it seems to me naturopaths I’m acquainted with are far more scientific than most doctors.