Two polio vaccines are used throughout the world to combat polio. The first was invented by Jonas Salk and first tested in 1952 and announced to the world by Salk on April 12, 1955. It consists of an injected dose of killed polio virus. Thereafter, Albert Sabin produced an oral polio vaccine using live but weakened (attenuated) virus. Human trials of Sabin's vaccine began in 1957 and it was licensed in 1962.

When the live-virus Sabin vaccine was developed, it spread in popularity for several reasons. First, it can 'infect' other, non-vaccinated individuals with whom the vaccinated person has close contact and confer some immunity to them. Second, because the oral vaccine acts in the gut, it confers immunity there and reduces the spread of the wild virus. The injected vaccine, acting through the bloodstream, immunizes the individual but does not reduce his ability to spread the wild virus. Third, the live-virus vaccine is cheaper than the killed-virus vaccine. Finally, the oral vaccine is easier to administer than the injected vaccine, so patients are more likely to complete the vaccination series and attain full immunity. Though Salk's vaccine had reduced the incidence of polio to a tiny fraction of what it was in the early 1950s, Sabin's vaccine was considered superior for these reasons and became the standard treatment. The killed-virus vaccine immunized people against the effects of the virus, but the virus could still spread from person to person. It was the live-virus vaccine that enabled the complete eradication of the wild polio virus in the United States.

The major disadvantage of the live-virus vaccine is that it can itself cause sporadic cases of polio either from the vaccine itself or from the circulation of the vaccine. There is neither risk from the killed-virus vaccine.

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