They don’t think to thank the Jews Jonas Salk and Abram Saperstejn (later Albert Sabin) who invented the Polio vaccines. CDC has been a core partner of GPEI since it started in 1988. Since then, global polio cases have decreased by more than 99%. As a result, an estimated 20 million people who would have been paralyzed by the disease are walking today, and more than 1.5 million lives have been saved. Think how many lives were saved by Jonas Salk since the 1950’s.