Vaccine Madness

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By Roseann Foley Henry

On a road trip this summer my son and I pulled off a highway into Wytheville, Virginia, intending only to fuel up with gas and coffee. We ended up spending hours there, soaking up its history and browsing antique stores. We took pictures of First Lady Edith Wilson’s birthplace, and of the giant pencil that adorns a local shop. Our serendipitous stop delivered charm by the barrel, for sure, but at a tiny local museum we learned a few lessons about public health as well. 

We learned that in the summer of 1950, an outbreak of polio hit Wytheville, hard. The crippling viral infection tore through the small city, with a demand for ambulances that overwhelmed its supply as children and adults were rushed to hospitals in a frantic attempt to save lives. The city pressed hearses into use to transport the sick, which must have multiplied the fear. 

That summer, Wytheville had one of the highest per-capita rates of polio in the nation. Terrified parents kept their children indoors to try to protect them from infection, but many children got sick anyway, and too many of them made that ambulance ride in vain. City leaders installed highway signs warning travelers not to stop there.

A little museum we visited offered up devastating photos of that summer – children in hospital beds, in ventilators, in leg braces – but the most gripping exhibits were the iron lungs themselves. I’d never actually seen one before, although I’d seen photos. To stand in front of them, one adult size and one heartbreakingly small for infants and children, was a gut punch of reality.

My parents, who started their family in 1953, knew all too well the fear that arrived each summer, when tens of thousands of children would be stricken. I can’t even imagine the relief they, and all parents, felt when Jonas Salk’s vaccine was approved in 1955. The shot soon became available to kids nationwide, and in 1962 there were fewer than 1,000 cases. By 1979 the disease was considered eradicated in the United States. A long national nightmare was over.

Throughout my childhood, memories of polio were still fresh – if not firsthand for us kids, then by extension through our parents. To this day I am still vaguely uncomfortable in a wet bathing suit, since my father believed the myth that they could spread the disease. He harangued us to change out of ours the second we would emerge from the water. Even today if I sit poolside for more than a few minutes I can still hear his voice in my head urging me to change. Don’t get polio!

My son, at 22, has no such memories. Although I thought of my dad’s warning sometimes when I would see my kids in wet swimsuits, it was always with a laugh at the memory. I never felt that fear my parents had experienced, never trembled at the thought that summer fun could lead to crippling illness. My son had read about polio in his history classes, where it was as distant for him as smallpox. He didn’t really get it – until we went to Wytheville, that is.

The museum exhibit was just one more bit of evidence that vaccines work. They have eliminated or defanged so many scourges – not just smallpox and polio but measles and rubella and tetanus and diphtheria and whooping cough — diseases that once claimed the lives of thousands, many of them children. 

That’s what makes it so unthinkable that we would go backwards. I understand the fear that perhaps we are giving our children too many vaccines, that we could be harming them in ways we can’t anticipate. But not vaccinating them means harming thousands of them in ways we absolutely can anticipate.

It is true that if you administer any drug to enough patients, there will likely be ill effects in some. Nobody wants to be one of the few people experiencing a side effect, and I can’t imagine how I’d feel if my child were one of them. If we don’t give those drugs to enough children, however, many more of them will suffer the illnesses and deaths that can (and certainly will) result. Possibly yours or mine.

Public health requires lifting our vision up from the one patient who means more to us than life itself and considering the larger picture. If one child becomes ill from a vaccine but a million lives are saved, is that vaccine a success? That depends on whether your child is the one, or one of the million. From an epidemiological standpoint, that vaccine is a win. But it turns quickly to a loss if parents withhold it from their children out of fear.

At the end of that terrible summer of 1950, the warning signs disappeared from the roads near Wytheville, although polio continued to tear through American communities each summer until the vaccine arrived. Those iron lungs in Wytheville are museum pieces now instead of medical equipment, testaments to the power of science, of medicine, of the human ability to outsmart deadly bugs. 

We must not shift into reverse, where the lessons once learned will surely be learned again.