In the summer of 1921, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a robust 39 year old – a golfer, a dancer, a sailor, a runner. He was spending time at the family getaway on Campobello Island, N.B., when, after a swim one day in a favourite pond, he complained of feeling unwell and went to bed. The next morning, one of his legs was lame. Then the other gave out. The man who would become the 32nd president of the United States would never regain the power to walk without help.
He had contracted poliomyelitis, a contagious viral disease that can attack the central nervous system and cause paralysis. There was no cure and no vaccine. It struck young children most often. Many had to be fitted with elaborate braces to support their disabled legs. Some could breathe only with the help of an iron lung, a coffin-like steel cylinder.
North America and Europe suffered through periodic outbreaks of polio in the early decades of the 20th century. Swimming pools and movie theatres were often closed to children during the summer polio season to prevent its spread. Terrified parents kept their kids away from playgrounds and birthday parties.
The outbreaks grew bigger over time. The United States had its worst year in 1952. Canada’s was 1953, when 500 people died, making it the deadliest epidemic since the influenza of 1918. Between 1949 and 1954, about 11,000 Canadians were paralyzed by polio.
Then something marvelous happened. Jonas Salk, a medical researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, had been testing a new vaccine that used “killed” polio virus to immunize people against the disease. Salk administered it to a variety of volunteers, including himself, his wife and their children. It worked. After further testing, authorities announced on April 12, 1955, that the Salk vaccine was effective and safe. Salk, born in New York to struggling Russian-Jewish immigrants, became a national hero.
This shining moment in medical history is worth recalling as the first set of vulnerable people gets inoculated against the novel coronavirus. Even though COVID-19 has been surging across the country, opinion polls show that many Canadians are still dubious about a vaccine. Even after years of routine vaccination for everything from tetanus to diphtheria to measles, vaccine hesitancy persists. The coronavirus vaccines have arrived so much sooner than expected that some people fear – without evidence – that they won’t be safe.
Such anxieties often swirl around vaccines. Despite all the excitement over Salk’s, not everyone rushed to get it. Teenagers and young adults proved especially reluctant, even though they were prone to the disease. Elvis Presley was recruited to help persuade them. He got his injection on the popular Ed Sullivan TV show. A handful of deaths from a manufacturing foul-up complicated the rollout.
But in the end, the Salk vaccine and the oral version from Albert Sabin that followed it were a brilliant success. In Canada, the number of polio cases plummeted from 9,000 in 1953 to just three in 1965. By the 1970s, the United States was averaging only 12 cases a year. Globally, thanks to a multinational vaccination campaign, cases have dropped by more than 99 per cent over the past three decades. If that campaign had never happened, 17 million people who are now healthy would have been paralyzed.
The victory against polio demonstrated in the most dramatic possible fashion that mass vaccination works. No more iron lungs, no more awkward braces, no more crippled children. Vaccination is even safer and more effective now, given all the advances since Salk. Consider: It took a half century from the discovery of the poliovirus to the release of a vaccine. It has been just a year since the emergence of the coronavirus and the first people are already getting their shots. That’s not a sign of reckless haste; it’s a sign that science is getting better.
FDR died a decade before the arrival of the vaccine against the disease that struck him out of the blue that summer day. He fought all his life to overcome his limitations, even teaching himself to negotiate stairs by using the railings like a gymnast uses the parallel bars. Thanks to vaccination, countless others have been spared his struggle. Let’s not forget that now.
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