When I was a child, my parents had a friend whose face was covered with pockmarks. One could see she was a beautiful woman under the smallpox scars. She was one of the lucky ones: she lived. There were also people who were able to walk only with braces on their legs, after contracting polio. Some people who got polio then had to be in an iron lung. It sounded terrifying.
It wasn’t clear where one got polio. My mother was anxious that we get our bathing suits off quickly when we were wet because maybe that’s how one got polio. It reminds me of when COVID was so new and we were washing all our food from the grocery store.
There were 1,226,351 people who died in the United States from COVID during the pandemic. I’m so relieved to have a vaccine now. I have friends who continue to suffer from long COVID.
I knew people who were deaf and/or blind from measles. I was one of the lucky ones.
When polio vaccines came out, one way they were distributed was they were put in sugar cubes and at school we all lined up and got a sugar cube and ate it gratefully. No one wanted to get polio. I don’t remember even one parent protesting their child getting vaccinated.
Every study that has been done of any scientific validity has shown that vaccines do not cause autism.
When I was older and some people became skeptical of vaccines, I asked my doctor in Chelsea, Brewster Martin, and he said, “Just wait until there is an epidemic of diphtheria everyone will change their minds about vaccines. Look at the cemeteries and see all the small tombstones, they were all children who died of diphtheria.”
Global immunizations have saved over 154 million lives over the past 50 years.