I'm going to guess that it's being blown out of all proportion by the anti vaxxor crowd - besides anything else the modern vaccines are made differently to those in 1955, and to higher standards.
There is also always the questions about "could cause cancer" (well yes, so can thousands of things you come into contact with every day), and how many lives were saved by the vaccine.
Polio was a real killer, and left far, far more with life long problems, so even if 1 in 10k people who had the vaccine developed cancer within 30 years of the jab because of it, it would still have saved far more lives than were lost, and had a far better outcome (even at say 1 in 1000 it would likely have worked out as a positive, Polio is nasty*).
If Polio was still around today, even knowing that issue, I'd be jumping at the chance of that vaccine if there wasn't a better one.
People don't seem to realise exactly how bad polio was, largely because the vaccine came in far enough back that most people these days are unlikely to have first hand experience of it, or not realise how many of the people they might have seen when young who had disabilities owed them to polio. IIRC at one point it was in short supply so only every other child got the vaccine - and many families had stories of the children that were not in the vaccine group, and got it and died or were left disabled.
*IIRC it was about 3% fatality in children and up to 20% in adults who caught it, with many more left disabled.