I came across an article yesterday that pointed out that had the politicization of vaccines which currently plagues us—a deliberate choice of words—existed in the 1950s we would never have eradicated polio. I had not thought of that, but it is so obviously true.
In the United States and the rest of the developed world you would have to be my age or older for polio to be more than a word from history. I went to grade school with a boy who was crippled by polio. He could barely walk with crutches and leg braces. He died when we were in high school. I do not know the numbers, but polio was a common disease then. I expect most people knew someone who had it.
I remember when Dr. Salk’s vaccine became available. The year was 1953. I don’t know exactly when I received the vaccine, but it was administered at school via swallowing a sugar cube. There was no controversy. No resistance. Only grateful acceptance and relief that this terrible disease would no longer cripple and kill.
Fast forward to 2001. Carol and I sailed from Gibraltar to Dakar, Senegal, to obtain visas for Brazil. We were there two weeks and were at first confused by the number of cripples we saw every day on the streets, pushing their maimed bodies, legs shriveled and twisted, on carts propelled by their arms, or just sprawling helplessly on the sidewalks. We learned that they had polio. This almost fifty years after the vaccine become available. How could this be? The answer is superstition, stupidity, and religious fanaticism. Health workers administering the vaccine in many countries have been killed by religious fanatics.
I am pleased to read that now twenty years later polio is said to have been eradicated in most of the world, including Africa.
But now we have the madness of COVID vaccine resistance.
The difference between now and the 1950s is the League of Village Idiots.
There have always been village idiots. There always will be. Until very recently, during our lifetimes, the village idiot wandered around, mumbling to him or herself, and unless he or she was violent, was tolerated and given some simple task and lived out his or her life in confused obscurity, never knowing there was one or more like him or her in the next village. Now the village idiot can go online and find the idiot in the next village and in villages all over the world. They are no longer alone. They can chant and re-enforce their fears and frustration and rage—rage has become so popular a word that surely a movement will develop to amend the Bill of Rights: Life, liberty and the pursuit of rage. Screw happiness. We want rage.
I am long on the record that to name our species homo sapiens, which means ‘wise or knowing man’, is a cosmic joke. There is a constant, overwhelming flood of proof. Among them that there is any controversy about COVID vaccines, beyond that many in the less developed world do not yet have access to them, and that we live in an age of the League of Village Idiots.
7 comments:
From a brief google search of the polio vaccine, it looks like it was in a double blind trial for a year before it was approved. The timeline appears to be that Salk developed the Polio vaccine in 1952, it underwent a double blind (placebo controlled) trial in 1954 and was approved in 1955. Contrast this with the covid vaccine...
Well said, and well remembered, Webb. I've taken to calling it the Tyranny of Trolls. Representative democracy reduced the problem of individuals to manageable noise. But now that they have a way to collect and organize, they've started electing their own reps. To the great detriment of civilized society.
I got the vaccine in March when I was first eligible to receive it. I'm in my 60s with a couple of health conditions, so it was a rational choice. But my son doesn't want to get it. First, he actually had Covid, so he has the antibodies and T-cells, he should be as immune as me, if not more so. Second, he's in his early 30s, so he might be around another 50-some years, and while it is probably safe long-term, there is no way to know yet. So he looks at the vaccine as all risk and no benefit for him. He's not an anti-vaxxer, his kids are getting all their regular childhood vaccines on schedule. I agree the politicization of this has been a disaster, but the powers-that-pretend-to-be should start being honest about natural immunity, rather than pretending it doesn't exist. This further undermines trust. (I normally comment using my real name, but not doing so this time so as to protect my son's identity).
The Salk vaccine was an injection of a killed-virus product and was first. I have vivid memories of getting it as a very young child. To this day I'm not sure whether my terror of needles is a result of that experience, or the fact that it was a product of my mother's terror of polio. I was going to get jabbed, no question, by that doctor, in his office. I think the needle got broken and was pulled out of my arm with pliers. I was hiding under a chair.
The Sabine vaccine was the sugar cube version, a degraded live virus product. So your recollection is conflated. I remember lining up in the school gym for that, and of course that was no issue. Because the killed-virus version can't give you polio, and the degraded live version could, Salk won.
Both of them brought vaccination into the mainstream. Later on the measles vaccine was an improvement on the measles parties. Do you remember them?
Oh no. Understand, this vaccine is different, in that it protects you from the way you get sick, not because of what you were sick from. So if you got Covid, you are vulnerable to variations. The vaccine attacks the way you get sick, so it protects against variations.
I say let the cull begin. I’m ready to move into sunlit uplands surrounded only by people smart enough to get vaccinated. If the next life is as blissful as they claim it’s only right that they should be crowding the pearly gates to get there.
I got the vaccine largely to help with the public health campaign to eradicate or minimise the spread of covid. I'm in my 60s so I'm hoping it'll help me too but realistically I've already had a long and healthy life.
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