No, a "Salt Water Placebo" Was Never Used in the Salk Vaccine Trial

Repeating something dozens of times does not make it true

No matter how many times the “experts” swear up-and-down that the control group in the clinical trial to license the original Salk polio vaccine used "salt water,” it will never make it true. It is just a flat-out falsity. And at this point, given how many times I have corrected them, a flat out lie.

But before we get to the official report for this trial showing it is a lie, let me directly quote a few of these false claims.

In 2023, Dr. Paul Offit, considered one of the world’s leading vaccinologists, in an article directly attacking me, expressly stated that: “In 1954, 420,000 first and second graders in the United States were inoculated with Jonas Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine; 200,000 were inoculated with salt water.” I quickly corrected Offit’s claim that “salt water” was used in this article.

Despite correcting Dr. Offit, in 2025, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), where Offit runs the Vaccine Education Center, falsely claimed this trial used a “saline placebo.”

Just days ago, ironically, when someone posted a clip of me speaking before the Kennedy Center, stating that no routine injected childhood vaccine on the schedule had been licensed based on a placebo-controlled trial, a community note was added citing to the above CHOP page claiming “the original polio vaccine tested against saline.” Here is what that looked like:

Then, when I posted on top of that note and showed the evidence that none of the trials relied upon to license these vaccines had a placebo-control group, the community note disappeared. Funny how that happens.

Here is the reality. It is categorically false to claim that 200,000 children were injected with salt water in the Salk polio vaccine trial. The official final report from the Salk trial, on page 51, describes precisely what these 200,000 children received as a control. It was an injection that included, among other things, the following ingredients: “199 solution” (a synthetic tissue culture medium and ethanol), “phenol red,” “antibiotics,” and “formalin.” Don’t take my word for it, see the full report for yourself.

No matter how many times so-called “experts” claim the control in this trial received saline, or how many times someone attempts to add a “fact check” or “community note,” it’s still false. Try as they want, they cannot change the fact that the control group in the Salk trial were not injected with saline but rather a brew of active, toxic, and other ingredients.

That is just the hard cold fact that they can never change unless they can get rid of every physical and digital copy of the original Salk report. For anyone bold enough to attempt that feat, good luck getting my original copy from a bank vault deep in an unnamed New York bank.