My Mother and the Polio Vaccine: Why You Need to Get the COVID Vaccine

I do Skype calls with my elderly mother fairly often.

And my mother is upset about the COVID situation in the USA and worldwide; She is especially concerned for young, working people who are at risk of Long COVID. 

So I asked her if she’d like to say anything to people online to encourage everyone to get vaccinated as soon as they can, and here is what my mother would like you all to hear: The story of Ohio’s Polio outbreak, by someone who lived through it. This is all noted down from her dictation via Skype. 

I am 76 years old. I was born in 1944, in Ohio. 

Now, Ohio started having problems with Polio pretty early, and it went on well into the 40s and 50s. (You can see this paper here for some information on Polio in Ohio in 1941.) 

It’s my generation’s fault that none of you know much about Polio, other than the fact that it happened, and it was bad, and now it doesn’t happen a whole lot anymore. I think we didn’t educate you because we were scared to, because we were traumatised and we remembered our parents fears, and it made us afraid.

We failed you, because you needed to know this. And it’s too late because, well, here we are, but I hope I can change some of your minds if you’re scared about the vaccine. 

When I was little, the Polio vaccine wasn’t available until the early 1950s. I think it was 1952 or 1953. Because I was a baby at the start of the outbreak, I don’t remember it, really. I remember my mother being terrified to send me to day care and to school. I remember not being allowed to play in the pool– A lot of kids caught Polio from swimming pools. Most of the public ones even shut down. 

My mother, just like every adult in the whole country, participated in the March of Dimes: You’d send in a dime, ten cents, and sent it straight to the Presidential Office to be counted and put towards finding a vaccine for Polio. It was so successful that the Post Office in my town had a special mail box set up, just for dime donation letters. I can’t fathom how many letters they probably got. Enough to fund the research for sure, I’d imagine. 

I was raised the first years of my life in the height of Polio fear. Infants could catch it, and a lot of them did; I think there were three different types of Polio going around. I know there were some kids in my street who died of it, they stopped breathing in the night, because if babies caught it, it could be hard to tell, and it came on fast. Polio could take you out suddenly, a baby would be crawling or an adult could be walking and then they just couldn’t anymore. They felt faint and got a temperature (fever), and then they struggled to get up again.

And then when I was a toddler, and I went to a small day care, there was a Polio scare. One of the kids fell sick with it on vacation, a weekend with their family. Nobody could tell exactly where they caught it. Turned out the father caught it at work, and the whole family got it. Only the mother and one daughter survived, out of a family of six. 

I remember very little from that age, but I remember that because my mother was stressed out of her gourd. She fussed over me like nothing else, watched me constantly for weeks, scared every single time I stumbled getting up or fell over when playing with my toys. My father worked at a steel mill, and he was terrified he’d bring it home. He took a job on the railway instead, because there was more open air and less people, not as many chances to get sick from someone working right next to you. 

Now, vaccines aren’t a perfect art. And while you all know about Salk’s vaccine, I bet you don’t know about the Cutter vaccine. 

The Cutter vaccine had a bad incident, where a tainted batch was sent out. People got sick from it. If I recall right, a lot of the people who got Polio from the vaccine died. 

But here’s the thing: I’m not telling you this to scare you. The opposite, actually. Because the error with the Cutter vaccine resulted in safer standards, better practices, more ideas that worked out for everyone. Sure, it scared the hell out of people. It caused some real panic, and doubt. But we kept our sense about us: Take your chances with a vaccine, or get Polio. Those were the options, and nobody wanted Polio. So some people wavered, but not a single damn one of us gave up or got too scared to think straight. When people are dying around you from some invisible, evil thing, the only thing you can do is everything you can to keep thinking straight. And it was no contest: We’d all rather take our chances with the vaccine.

Because if we got sick from some tainted Cutter vaccine, at least we’d get sick knowing we did the right thing, the best thing we could. It was scary! But morally, ethically, taking the vaccine was the only real option. Soon enough, it was proven that the tainted batch was identified and destroyed. Nobody else ever got sick from a Polio vaccine. So we were right to keep going and keep trying and keep thinking about the greater good. 

Those early Polio vaccines are nothing like the new COVID vaccine, they’re not even the same kind of recipe. The Cutter vaccine was discontinued anyway! So again, you don’t have this risk with any of the COVID vaccines. They’re all good as gold! This ain’t the fifties, you have more technology in your phone than we had in the whole world back then. I promise the math checks out. I bet your damn watch is a calculator too, so you can check the numbers yourself if you’re such a wise guy! 

But you see, in the early 50s, Mr. Jonas Salk, bless him every day, created the big deal Polio vaccine. The whopper, the smacker, the kicker! 

Before there was an injection for it, they would send it out to schools and community centers and hospitals in dropper phials, and a nurse would put a drop or two on a sugar cube for us young kids, and we’d suck on the sugar cube until it was all gone, and that was that. 

We were vaccinated! 

Every kid in Youngstown, Columbus, you name anywhere in Ohio and there were kids lined up around the block everywhere it was being offered. “Sugar cubes, don’t you want a sugar cube? Have a sweet treat that’ll keep you healthy, an apple a day is the old news!” I remember a nurse yelling that outside a local clinic, the biggest damn smile I’ve ever seen on her face. Made me giggle. Everyone was so happy. A vaccine! 

Now, some parents were scared of the vaccine, sure. But that ended right quick. And it ended, because Polio kept hitting those families. It killed those kids and parents and nobody in the whole country was fool enough to risk Polio. 

Because we all saw what Polio did. And I think the biggest thing about how COVID has been covered, is that the general public isn’t seeing how bad it is. 

You aren’t seeing people on ventilators, choking and dying. You’re not seeing the doctors and nurses, sweating and crying. You’re not seeing the toll on families and communities. You’re not seeing the people with Long COVID, mostly young adults who aren’t recovering, who are malaised and ill and suffering.

You see clips here and there, sure. You see some people’s videos of themselves, too. But you’re not seeing it the way we got to see Polio. 

With Polio, by god, there wasn’t a radio show or television station or newspaper that didn’t have nothing but Polio news. 

You’d see it everywhere. Kids in giant iron lungs. Wards with hundreds of them. I remember one story where automotive manufacturers in Detroit had to devote an entire manufacturing wing just to making more iron lungs to supply the nation with enough of them to try to keep people alive. It was horrific. 

And COVID is just as bad, it’s even worse, really. Because we have several Salk Vaccines for COVID, you have your pick in many places. You have so damn many vaccines that in a lot of places you can pick which one you want! 

But to those who are hesitating, or if you’re scared of getting vaccinated, or if you don’t know what to trust– Trust an old woman who got vaccinated as a toddler with a vaccine made with far less safety measures than you have today: I’m telling you, get vaccinated. I’m 76 years old, I never caught Polio despite years and years of breakouts of disease in my neighbourhood. I don’t have any illnesses related to the vaccine, I never got sick from the vaccine itself. 

I’ve been talking for a whole damn hour on this Skype call and I’m too tired for that, but my son is gonna share this with you all, and I hope you all read it. Pass it around, let people know. 

It’s your moral duty as a human being to get vaccinated. We were all scared too, we were confused and tired and it was bad. But it doesn’t have to keep being bad, and it’ll stop so much sooner if you get your vaccine. 

People are dying of this COVID disease and all that it does to your body, and people are getting sick and not getting any better, which is just as bad in a lot of ways. Can you imagine if we never took the Polio vaccine, after the Cutter incident? Polio would be everywhere, so many people would be sick and dead. But we bucked up and took the damn sugar cube because it was the right thing to do. 

And that’s all you need to think about: Getting vaccinated is the right thing to do. You save lives, you save your own life, you save your family and your friends and your community and your nation and the whole wide world. 

Don’t you wanna be a brave hero, like us little toddlers taking the Salk vaccine back then in the 50s? Now’s your chance. Save lives. Get vaccinated.  I did it when I was just a little kid, you can do it today, right now or as soon as you are able. Don’t wait any longer.