Dr. Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, which has saved millions of lives. A simple story about a polio victim changed the writer’s mind. (Senator John Heinz History Center)
I remember, when I was maybe just 5 years old, chewing a sugar cube to ward off a horrible, deadly disease.
My father was with me in the long line some 60 years ago as we fought polio, an affliction that killed people or left them paralyzed. Polio was — and to a small extent, still is — generally contracted by exposure in water that had fecal matter in it.
We were in a large auditorium or maybe a community center in Washington, D.C. My dad and I each gulped down a cube that contained a weakened version of the live virus. No shots, no pain, just sweets. (An earlier vaccine developed in the mid-1950s by Dr. Jonas Salk required a series of injections.)
Decades ago, polio survivors often had to use iron lungs to help them breathe. Photos of the bulky metal contraptions, to this impressionable child, suggested spherical torture chambers.
Polio is nearly eradicated today, endemic only in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Children now usually get a polio vaccine at 2, 4 and 6 months, and then a final dose at 4-6 years old, Dr. Leah Rowland, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk, told me by email.
The vaccine is “extremely effective, offering lifelong immunity of 99-100%,” Rowland said.
The fact that Americans rarely even talk about polio nowadays is a testament to the vaccine’s effectiveness and acceptance. It’s a huge success story.
Which is why the possible elevation of vaccine critics Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dave Weldon — to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, respectively, in a second Trump administration — is so alarming.
If not outright insane.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the chamber’s minority leader, is a polio survivor. He’s assailed Kennedy for seeking to rescind approval of the polio vaccine.
“Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” McConnell said in a statement, according to Politico.
People my age probably have vague recollections of the earlier, unusual sugar rush of the polio vaccine. Such memories should remain ephemeral.
They won’t, however, if misguided officials encourage conspiracy theories over proven vaccines. We don’t need a resurgence of diseases that are so easily preventable.
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