Some background:

90 to 95% of people exposed to polio actually don't show any symptoms.

To put things in perspective, only 1 out of 1,000 people actually get paralytic polio, the rest experience flu-like symptoms or nothing at all. Despite the fact that the medical establishment claims to have eradicated polio, far more effective factors contributed to polio's demise: sanitation, sewage control, refrigeration and central heat all contributed to stopping the disease.

Also, "polio" was reclassified into numerous other diseases around the same time it was supposedly "eradicated" due to the polio vaccine. In reality, polio cases just became reclassified as we learned more and more about subtle variations in diseases.

Check out this book: Vaccine Safety Manual for Concerned Families and Health Practitioners.

I highly recommend it...it really takes apart the "herd immunity" myth and particularly exposes how weak the claim is that the polio vaccine eradicated the disease. They cite numerous statistics that show that cases of polio actually increased in the the areas where they were being used in the US in the 50's.

What happened was that increased awareness of sanitation combined with a "reclassification" of what was known as polio led to the "eradication" of the disease. Right around the same time that the vaccine was introduced in the 50's, polio was finally reclassified as numerous diseases since we were starting to understand more about the subtle variations between them.

"Polio" until that point had referred to a whole group of ailments...and shortly after the vaccine was introduced, cases that previously had been labeled as "polio" now were identified correctly. This led to a sharp drop in reported polio cases, when what was happening was that there were just as many "polio-like" cases that they just weren't calling polio anymore.

If you have a healthy child with a healthy immune system in a first world nation with good sanitation, the chances are extremely slim your child will be paralyzed by polio.

So yes I would trust the child's healthy immune system over a corrupt and broken pharmaceutical establishment that would knowingly dump blood products tainted with HIV and hepatitis C, infecting hundreds of thousands, so as to not lose money.

And then there's the greatest medical blunder in the 20th century, which is directly related to the polio vaccine.

The following is from the well respected book The Health Century by Edward Shorter:

Sarah Stewart and Bernice Eddy's discovery of the polyoma in 1957 marked the real takeoff of theories about virus and cancer. It could be destructive like polio, but produce tumors at the same time.

At the same time in the late 1950s that Eddy and Stewart were producing cancers in animals with the polyoma virus, Eddy had sneaked back to the polio vaccine. "I did things on the side which I wasn't assigned to do," Eddy said. One of them was starting to conduct safety experiments on the polio vaccine in June 1959, from which she had officially been removed four years earlier (She exposed the danger of the polio vaccine and was ignored, resulting in the infamous Cutter Incident, in which 40,000 children contracted polio from faulty vaccines).

In observing cells from the kidneys of rhesus monkeys under the microscope—the kind of cell preparation from which the polio vaccine was being made by private drug companies—Eddy had noted spontaneous degeneration, meaning that the cells would start to die without any apparent cause. She did more experiments with these cells, and on July 6, 1960, reported to her chief Joseph Smadel, that when she injected preparations from those monkey kidneys into hamsters, the hamsters got cancer. Tumors grew in newborn hamsters at the site of injection; probably a virus in the monkey cells was causing the cancer.

The story that follows is such a sad one, partly because Smadel himself was a distinguished scientist, not just a petty bureaucrat...he was not pleased, just after assuming his new post in viral research, when Eddy threw this time bomb onto his desk: the possibility of a cancer-causing virus in the polio vaccine. In August he sat down with Eddy, went over her data, and dismissed the findings as "lumps."

The Eddy problem landed again on Smadel's desk when, in October of 1960, she gave a talk at the New York meeting of the Cancer Society. At the meeting she described finding a cancer-causing virus in the monkey cells from which the polio vaccine was grown. Smadel hit the roof. "Smadel called me up," Eddy said, "and if there was anything in the English language—any awful name—that he could call me, he did. Oh, he was mad. I never saw anybody so mad.” Smadel wrote Eddy a letter later that day forbidding her to speak in public again without clearing a written text of her remarks specifically with him. That was just the beginning.

Eventually, Bernice Eddy lost her labs. In successive measures she was denied permission to attend scholarly conferences, her papers were held up, and finally she was removed from vaccine research altogether. Her treatment became a scandal within the scientific community and was discussed in Senate hearings.

Bernice Eddy came to a shocking conclusion: an entire generation had been given cancer-causing monkey viruses. Using this knowledge, she predicted a future epidemic of cancer (sound familiar?).

Maurice Hilleman and Benjamin Sweet came to similar conclusions. One of the viruses they discovered they called SV-40, SV for Simian Virus, and 40 because it was the 40th such virus discovered. According to Hilleman:

The discovery of this new virus...raises the important question of the existence of other such viruses...As shown in this report, all three types of Sabin's live poliovirus vaccine, now fed to millions of persons of all ages, were contaminated with SV-40.

Hilleman also has claimed that Merck's hep B vaccines caused an AIDS epidemic in the US. The US government even admits that the hep B vaccine can cause lupus.

It should be noted that Maurice Hilleman is not some fringe scientist: he is credited with saving more lives than any other scientist of the 20th century.

John Martin, former FDA virologist, had this to say: "SV-40 infection is now widespread within the human population almost certainly as a result of the polio vaccine."

SV-40 is repeatedly extracted from several types of tumors, including brain, bone and previously rare chest cancers.

If you truly claim to have an open mind on this subject, read this book:

The Virus and the Vaccine: Contaminated Vaccine, Deadly Cancers, and Government Neglect

The polio vaccine is almost definitely responsible, more than any other factor, for the current epidemic of soft tissue cancers.

The US continued producing the polio vaccine using monkey kidneys until 2000, so this will affect your children and your grandchildren. Albert Sabin, one of the first developers of the polio vaccine, had this to say:

I think to release certain information is not a public service. There's too much scaring the public unnecessarily. Oh. your children were injected with a cancer virus and all that. That's not very good!

Researchers have found SV-40 in 45% of seminal fluid samples and 23% of blood samples from healthy donors, meaning that it almost definitely is sexually transmittable, can go from mother to child, and therefore can pass on to new generations.

There's also extremely compelling evidence of a connection between the polio vaccine trials that occurred in Africa in the 50's and the AIDS epidemic that originated in the exact same time and place.

Hilary Koprowski used monkey and chimpanzee parts in his vaccines. One of the first places he began the forced vaccination was Leopoldville, the location of a major AIDS outbreak in the late 50's.

Sabin, the other main producer of the polio vaccine, analyzed Koprowski's "oral" vaccine and found that it was "unstable and contaminated by an unknown virus."

Remember, Sabin was also manufacturing a contaminated polio vaccine with a different lethal virus: SV40.

In response to Sabin's claims of contamination, Koprowski simply scoffed at him and said he was just trying to discredit his work (as he would do again and again to anyone making this accusation).

The Wikipedia page on the OPV AIDS hypothesis, in typical Wikipedia fashion, dismisses the hypothesis in the first paragraph, but then throughout the article lists several interest points and distinguished and established scientists who have taken this hypothesis very seriously.

Here's the logical fallacy that seems glaringly apparent to me: (from Koprowski's Wikipedia page)

"The OPV AIDS hypothesis has been widely rejected throughout the scientific community and is contradicted by modern research on the origin of the disease."

In other words, now that we now that AIDS actually originated in the early 1900's (and maybe even earlier), the "experts" use this to disprove the hypothesis that the Koprowski vaccine trials were the origin of AIDS.

But this misses the essential point of the issue: just because this event wasn't the origin of AIDS doesn't mean contamination didn't occur on a wide scale. The timing is too extraordinary.

Here's an excerpt from this book:

From 1957 to 1960, after years of tinkering with monkey kidneys and polio germs, Dr. Hilary Koprowski tested his own experimental polio vaccine on 325,000 equatorial Africans, including 75,000 citizens of Leopoldville, Belgian Congo. 98% of the vaccine recipients were infants and toddlers. The youngest children received 15 times the adult dosage. Though Koprowski claimed he had the backing of the World Health Organization, WHO denied sanctioning the large-scale trials.

In 1959, Dr. Albert Sabin reported in the British Medical Journal that Koprowski's polio vaccine used in the African trials contained an "unidentified" cell-killing virus. It was never identified. However, in 1986 the earliest known blood cample containing antibodies against HIV was traced back to 1959. The serum came from a patient visiting a clinic in Leopoldville.

Koprowski's vaccine was not approved for human use, so it was discontinued in 1960 following the African trials. Thus, it was only administered to inhabitants of the Belgian Congo, Rwanda and Burundi--the precise area where high levels of HIV infection were identified by researched 30 years later. Furthermore, the AIDS virus is known to infect mucous cells, prevalent in the mouth. The African vaccines were squirted into people's mouths.