Headline writers blithely omit "a" and "the," but there's a big difference between "the polio vaccine" and "a polio vaccine."

The Washington Post splashes this in our face: "RFK Jr. ally filed petition to revoke FDA approval for polio vaccine."

I suspect that many readers experience alarm — Oh, no, it's crazy to take away the polio vaccine! — and read no further.

But it's not the polio vaccine. It's a polio vaccine. From the text of the article:

An ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. petitioned the government in 2022 to reconsider its approval of a widely used polio vaccine, which is credited with staving off a debilitating virus that can result in permanent paralysis.

The petition is about one polio vaccine, not all polio vaccines. 

Aaron Siri — a lawyer with a history of seeking to expand exemptions to vaccines — asked the Food and Drug Administration to suspend or withdraw approval of Sanofi’s polio vaccine for children.... In the 2022 petition, [Siri] raised questions about the safety of the polio vaccine and argued for more studies to be conducted.

I've added the boldface. That "the" in "the polio vaccine" refers to Sanofi's vaccine, and if you go to the link on "petitioned the government" you'll see Sanofi's vaccine distinguished from other polio vaccines.

The Washington Post has a subheadline with the word "the":

"A lawyer affiliated with Kennedy petitioned the FDA in 2022 to revoke approval of the polio vaccine despite scientific studies showing its safety and efficacy." That is so deceptive. Unless a reader carefully engages with the text of the article, one is very likely to think that Aaron Siri worked to deprive us of any vaccine to fight polio.

I remember in the 1960s, when the Sabin vaccine became available after years of using the Salk vaccine. Many parents, including mine, refused the Sabin vaccine. But we were vaccinated. We had the Salk vaccine. Here's an article about the history of the 2 vaccines. Excerpt: "During his lifetime Sabin staunchly defended his live-virus vaccine, refusing to believe any evidence that it could cause paralytic poliomyelitis. Salk, for his part, believed that killed-virus vaccine produced equivalent protection in individuals and in communities without any risk for causing paralysis. Despite Sabin’s belief, the risk for paralysis from the live-virus vaccine does exist, although it is slight. In 1999 a federal advisory panel recommended that the United States return to Salk’s vaccine because it cannot accidentally cause polio. On the basis of a decade of additional evidence, this recommendation was reconfirmed in 2009."

ADDED: The NYT has a new, useful article: "What the Polio Vaccine Has Meant for Public Health/A lawyer working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has asked the F.D.A. to withdraw approval of the current shot because it hasn’t been tested against a placebo. Scientists say such a test would be unethical."

The Salk vaccine was tested against a placebo in 1.8 million American first- and second-grade schoolchildren in a so-called double-blind placebo-controlled trial.... Salk himself objected to the use of a placebo during the clinical trial; he couldn’t imagine depriving a child of a lifesaving vaccine. As the petition before the F.D.A. notes, the current vaccine, manufactured by Sanofi, was not tested against a placebo; scientists and doctors almost universally agree that withholding a lifesaving vaccine would be unethical.

The Sanofi vaccine, given as a shot, is made using a technique similar to the one Salk used. It is an “inactivated” polio vaccine, meaning it is made using strains of inactivated, or killed, polio virus.

A different polio vaccine, first developed by the scientist Albert Sabin, a competitor to Salk, contained a live but weakened form of the polio virus. The Sabin vaccine, administered orally, replaced the Salk vaccine in 1962 and was in use for decades in the United States. But the oral vaccine caused eight to 10 cases of paralytic polio each year. In 1999, federal regulators decided to replace it with the current vaccine, which is safer...