Polio re-emerges in the U.S.
In the San Diego suburb of La Jolla, on the edge of a high coastal bluff overlooking the Pacific, two mirror-image rectangular buildings frame a spectacular view of the sky and the endless sea. In the courtyard between the stark, concrete buildings, a narrow “river of life” streams toward the edge of infinity. Designed by legendary architect Louis Kahn, the buildings are the public face of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, founded in 1960 by the pioneering scientist and medical researcher who developed a vaccine to conquer one of the most lethal of epidemic diseases — paralytic poliomyelitis.
Now, nearly seven decades after Dr. Jonas Salk’s triumph, we have grown careless. Polio, an infectious and lifethreatening disease declared eradicated in the United States of America in 1979, is once again among us in this country. It’s as if a cloud of smog has floated in to besmirch the view of limitless possibility from the Salk campus.
Before Salk’s breakthrough and before his rival, Dr. Albert Sabin, developed an even more effective oral vaccine, more than 45,000 Americans, on average, contracted polio annually.
Most were children.
In 1952, more than 3,000 polio patients died; many more were paralyzed. Those who lost the ability to breathe on their own were condemned to life in a bulky, claustrophobia-inducing tube called an iron lung. Less-developed countries suffered even more grievously than the United States.
We conquered the dreaded disease in 1955. One million 6- to 9-year-old “polio pioneers” were tested, and the Salk vaccine was declared safe and effective. By 1962, the number of polio cases in the U.S. had dropped to 910. In 1979, polio was declared eradicated in this country. In 1988, the World Health Organization predicted that paralytic poliomyelitis would be wiped off the face of Earth by the year 2000.
We came close. Thanks to concerted vaccination campaigns around the world, the World Health Organization declared all of the Americas and the western Pacific region polio-free in 2000. India went from 200,000 cases of polio annually in the 1990s to polio-free in 2014. Polio today is endemic in only two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In 2013, a 7-month-old child whose family had moved from India to San Antonio was diagnosed with polio.
That was the last diagnosed case in the U.S. — until a few weeks ago.
In July, a 20-year-old man diagnosed with polio in Rockland County, N.Y., served as an unsettling reminder that polio, highly contagious, can come back — and will, if we allow it.
Former University of Texas at Austin historian David M. Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Polio: An American Story,” believes that the success of vaccines in eradicating so many deadly diseases, including polio, has had the ironic effect of lulling us into complacency.
“These vaccines have done away with the evidence of how frightening these diseases were,” Oshinsky told The Guardian in 2020.
Willful ignorance has given rise to the dangerous anti-vaxx movement, responsible for stirring up unfounded fears about all manner of life-saving vaccines, including for COVID-19. Disinformation campaigns wage relentless war against vaccines.
Former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie, stoking doubt and distrust not only about the 2020 election but also about public health agencies and American institutions in general, also has contributed to vaccine hesitancy. His administration bears a modicum of responsibility for thousands of unnecessary COVID deaths.
“The anti-vaccine movement really accelerated during the time of COVID-19,” Dr. Peter Hotez told the Los Angeles Times recently. Hotez, codirector of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, warns that anti-vaccine activism in this country could threaten global progress on childhood vaccinations for numerous diseases, including polio.
He told the Times that the anti-vaxxers have morphed into a far-right political movement, which has led to population pockets around the country where people are no longer vaccinating their children, thereby allowing the reappearance of diseases that vaccines have tamed.
Hotez, who had published an op-ed 2017 in the LA Times titled “How the anti-vaxxers are winning,” told the paper for a story this month: “Today, I’d say they’ve won. It’s a pyrrhic victory but they won. They won at great cost to human life.”
One of the pockets they’ve won is in Rockland County, home to the young man recently diagnosed with polio. He’s a member of a large Orthodox Jewish community in the county that’s both insular and antivaccine.
In 2018-19, a measles outbreak sickened more than 300 members of the community, all of them unvaccinated. Public health officials worry that polio could be next. Rockland County, neighboring Orange County and nearby New York City have detected the polio virus in recent wastewater samples.
Fortunately, it’s as easy to thwart polio today as it was decades ago, when the Salk and Sabin vaccines came into being. Polio vaccines are safe. They are 99 percent effective.
Parents need to resist insidious antivaxx campaigns; they are a threat to the nation — and to the world. They need to make sure their children are vaccinated. They need to double-check their own vaccination status. It’s as simple as that. Anyone inclined to doubt the efficacy of polio vaccines should seek out aging “polio pioneers” in their community, women and men, including one on this editorial board, who remember the nation’s well-founded fear of polio and its fearsome effects.
The doubters also might consider Paul Anderson, a retired Dallas attorney who has lived inside an iron lung for 70 years. Anderson and the pioneers would likely point out that when it comes to thwarting polio, our intention should be clear — as clear and unobstructed as the awe-inspiring view of the Pacific from the campus of the Salk Institute. Complacence has devastating, irreversible and deadly consequences.
Anti-vaxx campaigns are a threat to the nation — and the world.