Swiftwater’s Forgotten Vaccine Lab

Long before Sanofi Pasteur's Swiftwater campus was producing roughly 42% of the nation's flu vaccine doses, a Brooklyn-trained doctor built the region's first vaccine lab in the same town for a very different disease.

Col. Richard M. Slee arrived in Swiftwater in the early 1890s recovering from cholera and married into the family that owned the Swiftwater Inn. In 1897, he used that connection to found Pocono Biological Laboratories, with the U.S. Army as his first customer. The lab produced an improved, glycerolized smallpox vaccine, developed at France's Pasteur Institute, with far fewer side effects than the older cowpox-based version, and by 1898 it supplied every vaccine used in the Spanish-American War in Cuba.

By 1915, the lab had expanded into tetanus, diphtheria, typhoid, and canine distemper vaccines shipped worldwide, so overwhelmed with demand by 1914 that it turned away an estimated $1 million in orders. Slee's son Arthur ran the lab while his father served in the military and later the New York State Department of Health.

Here's how we get from that lab to Sanofi Pasteur today. Per Sanofi's own company history, Pocono Biological Laboratories became part of the National Drug Company, then Connaught Laboratories, then Pasteur Merieux Connaught, then Aventis Pasteur, before the site took on the Sanofi Pasteur name it carries now, the same campus the whole way through. That campus produced its first influenza vaccine in 1947, decades before it grew into one of the country's leading flu vaccine producers.

As Pennsylvania works through its measles outbreak, it's worth remembering Monroe County isn't just a place a pandemic once passed through. It's the birthplace of the vaccine infrastructure now fighting one.