Vaccine skeptics should walk a mile in polio sufferers’ shoes

If you want to understand the impact of polio — if you want to comprehend the heartbreak polio victims feel about the return of infantile paralysis — if you want to sense the bewilderment polio victims feel about vaccine skepticism — then walk a mile in Stacy Smith’s shoes.

That mile-long walk is going to take a while. And the shoes? They’re Dr. Comfort orthopedic shoes, big enough to accommodate the braces on both his legs that extend from his upper thighs through the bases of his feet. Walk a mile in those shoes and ask Smith, who for more than three dozen years was a beloved anchorman on Pittsburgh’s KDKA television station, to tell you how at age 6 months, virtually every inch of his body except his eyes was paralyzed. How he had 13 surgeries, spending months away from his parents and brothers in another city, and only learned to walk at age 4.

Or take a stroll in the shoes of Paul Steiger, who at age 4 awakened with a staggeringly high fever and soon thereafter was in a rehab center. He made a substantial but not full recovery from polio and, like Smith, is suffering a rebound from the disease. That stroll with Steiger, who was managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and the founder of the Pro Publica investigative news organization, isn’t going to be brisk, either, especially if it involves even slight hills. But along the way, he will have time to tell you how he, too, was separated from his brother and parents for treatment.

Or take a walk down memory lane with me. I never had polio, but my father did, and everyone in our family has vivid memories of how one of his legs was a third the circumference of the other one. It may be too much to say he died from polio at age 79, but his doctors told us his weakened immunities and other factors contributed to his death. During that walk with me, I may tell you about how my dad and I were in the hospital at the same time — he being treated for polio and me being born. When my parents brought me back to the flat on Lafayette Place in Salem, Mass., where they lived, the girl downstairs was on an iron lung. Hardly anyone alive today knows what an iron lung is, but suffice it to say it was a large respirator in the shape of a horizontal cylinder that looks a bit like a miniature version of the space shuttle without the wings.

Families worldwide lived in terror of polio, which is in a way my own origin story. My Canadian grandparents, responding to the fear the disease spread in cities in hot weather, shipped my mother one summer to live with an aunt on Boston’s North Shore.

“After the Second World War, polio was the great terror of most American families,” said Jason Opal, a Mcgill University historian who’s writing a history of epidemic diseases. “From 1945 on, pools and schools were closed and there were small-scale shutdowns everywhere.”

So there, on a beach, my Montreal mother met my Massachusetts father, home from World War II. In 1951, they married. Two years later, my father contracted polio. Shortly thereafter, I was born. About the same time, my Aunt Reva, one of the first female graduates of the Columbia School of Journalism, was forced by polio to relinquish her reporter’s notebook for the sketchbook of an interior decorator. Her protege worked on the interior design of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Then came Jonas Salk. His name means little to anyone under the age of 50, but to the rest of the population — fully a third of the people now living in the United States — there are few people more venerated than Dr. Salk, whose polio vaccine was licensed on April 12, 1955. No World Series or Super Bowl championship was celebrated with greater enthusiasm. When word was conveyed that day on car radios, motorists stopped and honked their horns. For good reason. The number of annual new cases of polio, then 58,000, swiftly dropped by 96.5 percent. By 1961, there were only 161 new cases. By 1979, polio was considered eliminated in the United States. Last year, there were only six cases worldwide.

That was last year. This year, the first case of polio in the United States in nearly a decade was identified in an unvaccinated adult man. Last month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency over polio. The World Health Organization has declared polio is “circulating” in the country. A few weeks ago, University of Connecticut clinical professor of pharmacy Jennifer Girotto warned in the online journal The Conversation “because many people have not yet been vaccinated, there is now a real possibility of a resurgence of polio in the U.S.”

One last thought: While walking in Steiger’s shoes, you undoubtedly will realize they are size 8EEEEEE. That might give you second thoughts about vaccine skepticism.