Why was my Mom forcing me to walk with her around our neighborhood asking our neighbors for any spare dimes? The reason, I soon learned, was to fill the dime-sized pockets in our individual cardboard sleeves for the March of Dimes campaign for the development of a polio vaccine.

The year was 1953 and I had just recovered from polio having been in hospital isolation for nearly a month, enduring steaming hot woolen blankets draped across my body twice a day, which was supposed to prevent any paralysis.

Earlier that year, at the tender age of nine, I distinctly remember visiting our family physician who administered a spinal tap as I was curled up on his examining table. My Dad was with me, holding my hand, but I was scared. That next day I saw my Mother crying as she was hugging my Dad and soon, they took me to the hospital for the beginning of my isolation, which was the worst thing I had yet to experience during my young life.

Fortunately, I was able to survive polio with no residual effects, unlike some others with whom I shared that month-long hospitalization. And now here I was trekking through our neighborhood asking for any loose dimes our neighbors may have.

My Mom tried to explain to me that those dimes were going to pay for research into developing a shot to prevent polio. I didn’t understand how that could happen, but a year later all of us in my fourth-grade class lined up for a shot in the arm that would prevent us from getting the polio scourge. Since I had already contracted the disease and supposedly had antibodies, I was excused from taking the shot and let me tell you, I was happy about that.

Later in my life when I joined the U.S. Army, one of my first experiences was walking down a double row of needle bearers, who I swear had just returned from the motor pool having been now designated as medics — not mechanics anymore — giving all of us shots in each arm for every disease known to humankind (or at least it seemed like it). And we all received shot record cards to prove it.

All of this brings me to trying to understand why some in our country refuse a vaccination that can prevent COVID and its handmaiden, the Delta variant. Back in the day, we didn’t even think of not getting the polio nor smallpox vaccinations, nor any other prophylactic for that matter that would prevent us from contracting a dread disease. As a result, around the world polio was wiped out and smallpox was eradicated, except for a few strains locked up in a vault somewhere. Forevermore, nobody was crippled nor scarred for life or worse, dead from contracting polio or smallpox.

But now a sizable percentage of our fellow Americans refuse the COVID vaccination for reasons that are beyond my belief. They are jeopardizing their own health and life not to mention the lives of those with whom they may come in contact. It’s selfish and, quite frankly, ridiculous. And they say they’re doing it all in the name of freedom. For someone like me, a polio survivor, it’s unbelievable: What freedoms are they talking about? Should these anti-vaxxers be forced to self-isolate until COVID goes away? That sure isn’t freedom either, is it?

In our own meat industry, unvaccinated workers super-spread COVID simply because they were toiling close to one another. But vaccination cures all of this. To keep our plants running, every employee should be vaccinated. While that may seem rather arbitrary, it’s just as sensible as refusing a vaccination citing individual freedom.

Now we are seeing another resurgence of COVID illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths. Face masks are again mandated, but that’s another story. Our hospital ICUs are filling up with unvaccinated patients using their last breaths to beg for the COVID vaccine.

The science is confirmed, clear and compelling: COVID vaccines prevent the disease. Please, if you haven’t already, get vaccinated — now.

No doubt there will be those who disagree with me, and I look forward to hearing their reasoning. Just keep it civil, please, as this is a family publication.

Remembering polio and the vaccine that cured it

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