When I was seven or eight years old in the 1960s, I went to the doctor’s office and they had me eat a white cube of sugar with a red dot on it. After I did that, I was told that I was now vaccinated against polio.
At about the same time, I was attending a segregated public school for disabled kids. There was a group of disabled children there whom the rest of us referred to as the “polios”: the kids that became disabled due to the polio virus. They were older than me and there weren’t too many of them —by this time polio had been pretty much eradicated because of the vaccine. It seemed like these kids would be the last of the polios because polio would soon be a thing of the past.
Or so we thought. But now it looks like polio might be making a comeback.
I never thought I’d see the day when that would happen. But there have been a lot of stories in the news in recent years about cases of polio popping up all over the world. In August, after ten months of war between Israel and Hamas, a child in the war zone contracted polio. It was the first recorded case of polio in more than twenty-five years in Gaza.
Polio is a highly contagious disease, usually spread through contaminated water and sewage. Children under the age of five are particularly vulnerable. Many children were not able to receive their vaccinations because their families were displaced or killed, and Israel has wiped out Gaza’s health care infrastructure.
If polio does come roaring back to a level resembling what it was in its golden era, you can place a large part of the blame on those who attack the very idea of the public sector just to score some cheap political points. When they do that, they weaken the effectiveness of public health entities.
These fearmongers were out in full force during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, vilifying public health officials who were trying to tell us the painful truth about what was happening. They painted them as incompetent and deceitful, just because they worked in the public sector. They made questioning and defying everything a public health official said seem like a cool thing to do.
Thus, many people just went ahead conducting business as usual, refusing to cooperate in ways as simple as wearing a mask in public. Lots of people died unnecessarily.
And so if polio returns with a vengeance, it seems certain to me that these same foolishly defiant forces will once again rear their ugly heads and pave the way for the disease to rage on. And lots of people will die unnecessarily again.
I swear they won’t stop until polio wins an award for “Comeback Deadly Disease of the Year.”