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This little bit of junk science is making the rounds on social media, as it does roughly once a year:
Part I:
The polio vaccine was a big deal because Salk, a bad tempered Eastern European med school dropout believed there was a vaccine for every disease, and whose life's goal was to commercialise vaccines, which are an old idea taken from the school of homeopathy ("like protects against like") which actually predates medicine itself. Salks great contribution was figuring out that car antifreeze kept the vaccine shelf-stable.
It can be traced back to AD 175 and the epic poem of Marcus Lucanus who first documented the practice of Namib tribesmen who ate snake venom to (successfully) develop an immunity to their bite. It's a pity they don't tech the classice in America, not all of ancient Greek and Roman teachings were lots during the 1000 years Christian rule that eliminated all pre-christian knowledge during a period we know as the "dark ages".
Fast forward to the 1940s, 1944 to be specific and there were two contenders for a solution to the polio crisis, one was salk's vaccine, which worked, but with a few false starts that gave people polio instead. Ooops.
Salk:
Salk wasn't the only one that found a working treatment for polio. While car anti freeze did indeed keep the vaccine shelf-stable, why don't we use it to keep apple juice fresh? Look at the label on some, it doesn't say "Propylene glycol added to preserve freshness" it says "vitamin C added to preserve freshnes". Why didn't Salk use that instead then? Because it killed the virus.
Which was already known.
In 1931 Linus Pauling published his seminal paper on the nature of the hydrogen bond and we suddenly understood the way molecules worke and bond angles was the great leap forward (Look at Pauling's video on DNA on youtube - entitled "alpha helix" - Pauling discovered the shape and bond angles of the alpha helix, Late Rosaline discovered it was DNA and this work was literally stole by Watson and Crick, two acid heads who were looking for a subject for theit grad school studies. For this they got a nobel prize, which one of them sold after being annoyed the scientific world rejected his idea that white man was genetically superior) leading to the founding of: biochemistry, molecular biology and quantum chemistry.
By 1933 we'd isolated vitamin c thus ending a many thousand year mystery.
No virus can live in the presence of vitamin C, not a single one and indeed, Klenner proved that it was not only well tolerated in therapeutic doses, not just the homeopathic doses we take as "vitamins", an observation that has been made and documented in the scientific literature every decade since then, but that it would kill the polio virus in humans:
"Klenner's paper (Klenner FR. The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. J. South. Med. and Surg., 111:210-214, 1949.) on curing 60 cases of polio in the epidemic of 1948 should have changed the way infectious diseases were treated but it did not." - Robert Cathcart
So. In 1944 we had two modalities of treatment for the disease and while there are no side effects from C, there is a national database of side effects registry for vaccines that list side effects up to and including death.
Thus, industry had to choose and chose the one that could be patented.
So, we ignored scince and went with homeopathy, which does work, and is very profitable, but at a cost in human lives and suffering.
Pauling:
So where does it leave us now?
Pauling went on to change the opinion of the League of Concerned scientists from "we need nukes" to "we need to get rid of all nukes" for which he got a second nobel and is the only man to date that won two nobel prizes (Madame curie won two for her work with radium, which alse caused her death at a young age from cancer. Pauling also developed cancer but lived to 93) and was vilified by industry the entire time.
The great contributions to medicine in the 20th century were antibiotics and vaccines, neither of which work well any more. Antibiotic resistance is an overarching issue and while the vaccine industry nearly completely funds the CDC, WHO and NIh, a monoculture of prevention by vaccine is problematical for two reasons:
1) That a vaccine can immediately train the immune system is fine but if that immune system lacks the raw materials it needs to do its job means this is no no consequence and is why there is not and can never be a vaccine for the filovirus clade that includes the worst diseases known to man: ebola and hiv.
2) A monoculture of prevention does not work when some people can not have the injection; we gave up and never bothers pursuing a cure. This is not sustainable going forward.
There are other ways and once again we look to Africa but not, this time at the Namib tribesmen but instead to the coastal forests of Gabon:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/health/ebola-immunity.html
These guys have an immunity to Ebola that has nothing to do with vaccines and everything to do with Pauling's discovery and if it were not for them we would all be dead today; a communique from the WHO in October of 2014 pointed out unless a treatment was found soon Africa would fall by xmas of that year with the rest of the world following two years later. Fortunately we figured out why the immunity exists in Gabon and now that immunity is spreading and you'll notice no American died on American soil of this disease, which is normally up to 99.9% fatal. We owe everything to those tribes in Gabon and would have died if we relied on vaccines, which do not work against Ebola and can never.
Science does't make T shirts and post them to social media, that's business that does that and the business of vaccines is so big now it dominate medical research regardless of the flaws and shortcomings.
So that's why the original post is misleading, it does't tell the whole story and really is fake news.
The vaccine industry came of age with the flu vaccine that made that segment of the pharma industry large enough to nearly fully find the CDC, WHO and NIH. The problem is the flu shot not only does not work but risk of death increases with subsequent injections. That is, instead of lowering the death rate the flu shot increases it. Risk of death from flu has been shown to increase, not decrease, with lifelong exposure to it.
Summary:
For the past decade doctors have been pissed off because they cant get information about how effective it is. See Ben Goldacre's Ted Talk on Battling Bad science.
In 2005 a paper came out that showed the shot becomes less effective the more you get and in the elderly, increases, not decreases the risk of death. [1]
In 2012 Canada, noticing the US had no way to measure flu deaths, invented a way and got some big award for it. [2]
The 2015 shot was mismatched and didn't offer any protection. The 2016 shot was matched and offered less. At this point our health people have given up on it.
By the US government owl tests, even a small dose of vitamin c worked better [4]. Tamiflu works less (Cheney's co convinced governments worldwide to stockpile it. Ooops) [5]
The Atlantic had an article on it [6], the CBC covered all the major details over the years. If you think all doctors suggest the shot you'd be wrong. Many have been complaining about it for a while.
Note I'm not anti-vax. The ones that are safe and effective are good things. The flu shot is neither though I'm afraid. Not by the numbers, anyway, now that we have accurate ones finally.
A blanket condemnation (or promotion!) of vaccines is inappropriate, as is the insistence of a monoculture of it. The myth there is nothing we can do about viruses was debunked just after WW II and the decisions can be shown to have based on politics not not science. [7]
The H1N1 flu went through here in 09/10. I did as these vitamin guys suggest and was only sick for two days with it then back to work. Either that or I experiences spontaneous remission.
My mum and youngest daughter went downhill for two weeks and when given a choice of emerg or vitamins, were suddenly better the next day in both cases when they chose the latter. My darling wife, that I had known since we were both teenagers and mother of my daughters died from this after going downhill for 6 weeks, as her dad said "she could be a bit stubborn sometimes"; the coroner's report said H1N1. That's a lot of coincidental spontaneous remission. But it is consistent with a plethora of other clinical reports over the past 75 years, citations in Medline given in Levy. [8]
So, until there is clinical evidence the shot works and no longer increases the risk of death, there is no reason to get one.
Refs:
[1] http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=486407
[2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/flu-deaths-reality-check-1.1127442
"That's lower than we would like to see, but it's an improvement over the previous year, because it couldn't be worse, frankly"
Skowronski said the vaccine was well-matched, but overall, the protection was disappointing
'There's no use promoting a vaccine that isn't working well.' - Dr. Danuta Skowronski, BC Centre for Disease Control
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-flu-shot-vaccine-skowronski-h1n1-1.3669427
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10543583
[5] http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science
[6] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/does-the-vaccine-matter/307723/
[7] "Klenner's paper (Klenner FR. The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. J. South. Med. and Surg., 111:210-214, 1949.) on curing 60 cases of polio in the epidemic of 1948 should have changed the way infectious diseases were treated but it did not." - Robert Cathcart