What he wouldn’t have done for a vaccination in 1949
Pete Carton understands vaccine reluctance. He understands the fear of giving oneself over to blind, hopeful trust in medical science, of weighing the potential consequences of the disease against the potential consequences of the cure.
But he knows where he stands, because he has been on both sides.
In the summer of 1949, an outbreak of polio was terrifying families across the Northeast, including the Hartford, Conn., area, where Carton was a 6-year-old kindergartner. Carton’s widowed great-aunt offered his mother her rural Vermont home as a safe haven for her children: Pete and his two younger sisters could come and stay for as long as it might take for the poliovirus to, hopefully, run its cyclical course.
Pete’s mother, Mary, declined, and a month later, to her lasting guilt, her son was infected with polio. Carton remembers when its first symptom hit: He became so light-headed and dizzy he tumbled down the stairs of the family home into his father’s arms. At the hospital he was placed in an iron lung — a mechanical respirator — so shallow was his breathing.
His father, Jim, who had already seriously and permanently damaged his leg in a fall during the war while working in Britain as the ground-crew supervisor of an Army Air Corps fighter wing, was touched by the poliovirus as well, as was one sister.
Young Pete Carton would forever be marked by polio.
He was initially too weak to use a walker; he simply didn’t have the strength in his right hand. For a short period of time he used a wheelchair. When the disease’s toll became evident, Carton’s grandmother visited a Catholic shrine in Quebec, Canada, prayed for him fervently and brought back holy oils with which to anoint him.
“I had to learn to walk again,” Carton said.
In 1952, the first effective polio vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk and a team at the University of Pittsburgh, was made available, and it was world-changing. But then, in 1955, tragedy: One of the six labs manufacturing the vaccine, Cutter
Laboratories of Berkeley, produced defective batches of the vaccine that contained active polio virus. Some 200,000 children received the defective vaccine, and of those 40,000 contracted polio, 200 were left with varying degrees of paralysis, and 10 died.
In 1961, Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine became widely available and supplanted Salk’s injected vaccine, which had been hurt in public opinion by the Cutter disaster. Carton, by then a teen, was understandably reluctant to receive the Sabin vaccine.
“It affected me because I knew about polio,” said Carton, whose family by then had moved from Connecticut to Tucson, Ariz., and on to the California desert city of Lancaster, where his father worked at Edwards Air Force Base. “I knew what it had done to me once and I didn’t want it again. But I was coaxed into taking the Sabin stuff. Of course, it was a different world.”
It was indeed. Carton, the oldest of eight eventual children, didn’t allow his disability to define him. He was elected student body president at his San Fernando Valley high school, and after first attending college at Loyola University (now Loyola Marymount University), where he studied all the way from true freshman to law school graduate, married his high school sweetheart.
Polio’s one and only favor: It kept him out of Vietnam.
He eventually divorced, landed in Kern County, married a social worker, went on to a 30-year career as an attorney with the Kern County Superintendent of Schools office and, in the process, raised six children. Carton, 78, retired a few years ago.
Today, he has one leg that is slightly shorter than the other, very limited use of his left arm and the partial loss of one set of muscles in his right arm.
His father and grandfather were athletes — dad was captain of the baseball team at Yale, shortly before George H.W. Bush held that honor, and grandpa played against Olympian and multiple-sport star Jim Thorpe — but Carton was mostly deprived of that opportunity. He did, however, serve as a volunteer referee for an American Youth Soccer Organization program in Bakersfield for more than 20 years, starting in 1994, even working some games involving teams coached by this correspondent. Today Carton is an unabashed advocate for the COVID-19 vaccines. He says he believes in science and bemoans the rampant misinformation that hinders its acceptance.
At its peak in the 1940s and ‘50s, polio killed or irreversibly paralyzed about a half-million people per year worldwide. Thanks to vaccines, the U.S. has been polio-free since 1979, according to the CDC. Also rare today, thanks to vaccines recommended for more than 50 years by the CDC in all 50 states: diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, rubella and chickenpox.
COVID-19 has killed 5.1 million people worldwide in less than two years, including 8,657 (and 69 in California) on Nov. 12, according to data aggregated by Google.
“I don’t hesitate to yip at anybody who doesn’t” accept the vaccines as effective, Carton said.
He is a living testament to the risks of missing the opportunity to protect oneself.
“You want to see the effect of some of these things, these diseases?” he said. “Bring a camera and come out to my house. Take a look at me.
“I know that if we had had the vaccine in 1948 my mom would have availed herself of it, because she already knew about the other (available vaccination) shots” and believed in them. “The belief was that vaccines saved you, they didn’t kill you.”
And, Carton said, he believes that’s still the case.