Film Story

With the world now facing a global pandemic, the story of how a then unknown 33 year old doctor Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh pulled together with the country to develop the world’s first polio vaccine is the inspiration story we all need today.

The documentary The Shot Felt Round The World began when Carl and his students at the University of Pittsburgh filmed the 50th anniversary of the Salk polio vaccine speaking with Dr. Peter Salk, the eldest son of Jonas, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Polio: An American Story David Oshinsky, those who worked alongside Jonas Salk in the lab, and many polio pioneers who were amongst to take the then experimental polio vaccine.

“Shot” won Best Documentary at the San Luis Obispo Film Festival and was then picked up by the Smithsonian Channel where Kurlander and Smithsonian producer Charles Poe were able to film an addition interview with Bill Gates who connected the development of the Salk vaccine to today’s efforts to end polio and combat infectious disease.

That one hour TV program, A Shot To Save The World, won the 2015 CINE Golden Eagle Award for Best Science Program and was shown around the world including in prime time on the BBC as The Polio Story: The Vaccine That Change the World.

In summer 2020, Kurlander appeared on CBS Sunday Morning  on this story How The Fight Against Polio Was Won     in which he and Dr. Paul Duprex, the director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, paralleled the development of the Salk vaccine to present day efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine.   That has led to a new vaccine education program which will premiere in 2021.

That piece came from an article Kurlander wrote on The Deadly Polio Epidemic and Why It Matters for Coronavirus.

Kurlander wrote a subsequent article on Lessons from how the polio vaccine went from lab to the public that Americans Can learn from today with his collaborator Dr. Randy Juhl.

In addition to these films and articles, Kurlander also pioneer a vaccine education program, Take A Shot At Changing the World, a viral video contest in which young people were encouraged to use the polio film to make their own videos on vaccines.

A CBS Sunday Morning News story on How We Won The Fight On Polio featuring Dr. Paul Duprex, the Jonas Salk Chair and director of Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research, and Kurlander has led to a new film, Chasing Covid, which seeks to demystify how vaccines are made and distributed and to address issues of vaccine hesitancy.