Life, death in iron lung shows value of vaccines
On March 11, a man named Paul Alexander died at the age of 78. He held the world record for number of years living inside an iron lung.
Alexander contracted polio in 1952, at the age of six. His terrified parents brought him to Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where Alexander, paralyzed below the neck, was placed in an iron lung because he could not breathe without one. Poliovirus, with its predilection for attacking the spinal cord, had stolen his ability to breathe by paralyzing his diaphragm. He spent months living in the coffin-like metal cylinder that exerted alternate positive and negative pressure on his tiny body to inflate and deflate his lungs. Later, he learned breathing techniques that allowed him to survive outside the iron lung for hours at a time, but he would never be free of it.
Alexander was especially unlucky because just three years later, in 1955, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced, saving millions of lives as cases of polio plummeted. The vaccine also gave Americans blessed relief from crippling fear that gripped communities each summer. Fear of poliovirus’ spread forced closure of theaters, swimming pools, and libraries. Public gatherings were banned. Parents kept children indoors and forbade playing with other kids. Neighbors avoided neighbors. A 1955 survey showed that Americans feared polio more than any other calamity except nuclear war.
It should be easy for us to understand this fear because we experienced it during the COVID-19 pandemic. With both contagions, vaccines were our saviors. But whereas in the mid-twentieth century the polio vaccine was considered a godsend and doctors like Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin (who developed a separate polio vaccine) were lauded as heroes, today COVID vaccines, and vaccinations in general, have become controversial.
Anti-vaccine activists sow doubt about the very miracle treatments that undergird the health and stability of our society. Because we are not dying from highly contagious infectious diseases like mumps, measles, and rubella, we are free to live longer, healthier lives and pursue our personal and economic goals. To forgo vaccinations is to invite disaster. We see such consequences today at schools in Florida, a shelter in Chicago, and in 15 other states where measles outbreaks among the unvaccinated have caused healthcare emergencies.
Too many have forgotten the fear, chaos, and tragedy that infectious diseases have wrought throughout history. We forget that, without a polio vaccine, any one of us could have been Paul Alexander, living 70 years in an iron lung. Four years ago, the United States went into lockdown. COVID vaccines, created at warp speed, enabled the resumption of our lives. And yet, the surgeon general of Florida has called for a halt to COVID vaccine use.
It is not only that we take vaccines for granted. We are also guilty of selfishness in the name of individualism and “personal rights.” The power of vaccination in a community far exceeds the benefits to any individual. When young, healthy people eschew vaccinations because they deem their personal risk of death from infection to be slight, they forget that reducing the burden of infection in a community saves countless lives, particularly among those unable to receive or respond to a vaccine due to medical reasons. A college student may survive a bout of severe COVID, but the elderly or immunocompromised person he passes it to may not.
In 2021, Henrique Gouveia e Melo, a Portuguese naval officer in charge of his nation’s COVID vaccination drive, appealed to his countrymen’s sense of duty by saying: “We are at war, and this is a war against the virus, so what side [do] you want to be on? With the virus, ‘cause you are crazy and you are helping the virus to spread? Or are you on our side, the community?”
Sadly, COVID is the disease that took Paul Alexander’s life this month. Despite his infirmity, he lived an inspiring life. Through homeschooling, he became the first person in Dallas to graduate from high school without attending a class in person. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas. Then he added a law degree and became a practicing attorney. In 2020, he published a memoir called “Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung,” that took him eight years to dictate and write using a plastic stick to tap out words on a keyboard.
In a 2020 interview, Alexander recalled times when his disability caused him to seem invisible to the able-bodied. To those spared his affliction, he wanted to say,
“You should get down on your knees and thank God it wasn’t you.”
Vaccines allow us to cheat death. We must use them.