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CINCINNATI – The COVID-19 pandemic and the distribution of the vaccines that will prevent it have surfaced haunting memories for Americans who lived in an earlier era when the country was swept away by a virus that for so long seemed have no remedy or means to prevent it.
They were children then. They had friends or classmates who ended up in wheelchairs or dragged their legs with braces. Some went to the hospital to use the steel lungs they needed to breathe. Some never made it home.
Now they are older adults. Once again, they find themselves in what has been one of the hardest hit age groups, just as they were when they were kids in the polio era. They share their memories with today’s youth as a lesson in hope for the emergence of COVID-19.
Clyde Wigness, a retired University of Vermont professor active in a mentorship program, recently told 13-year-old Ferris Giroux the story of polio during their weekly Zoom call. Families and schools saved coins to contribute to the “March of Dimes” to fund polio efforts, he recalled, and the nation celebrated successful vaccine tests.
“As soon as the vaccine came out, everyone jumped on it and got it right away,” said Wigness, 84, from Harlan, Iowa. “Everyone jumped on the bandwagon, and basically it was eradicated in the United States. “
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, before vaccines were available, polio epidemics caused over 15,000 cases of paralysis each year, with deaths in the United States peaking at 3,145 in 1952. Outbreaks have resulted in quarantines and travel restrictions. Soon after vaccines became widely available, US cases and death tolls dropped to hundreds a year, and then to dozens in the 1960s. In 1979, polio was eradicated in the United States.
“So really, what I would like people to be reassured is that there have been many times in history when things did not go as we expected,” says Joaniko Kohchi , director of the Institute for Adelphi University. Parenthood. “We are adapting and our children will have skills, strengths and resilience that we did not have. “
While today’s kids have learned to stay home and go to school remotely, to wear masks when they’ve been anywhere, and to use hand sanitizer frequently, many of their grandparents remember childhood summers dominated by worry about the airborne virus, which also spread through feces. Some parents have banned their children from neighborhood public pools and playgrounds and avoided large gatherings.
“Polio was something my parents were very scared of,” said Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, now 74. “My dad was a huge baseball fan, but he was very careful not to take me into big crowds… my dad’s friend thought his son had caught him at a Cardinals game.
A 1955 newspaper photo recently surfaced showing DeWine becoming one of the first sophomores in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to be vaccinated. His future wife, Fran Struewing, was a classmate who also had hers that day. Sixty-six years later, they got the COVID-19 vaccines together.
DeWine, a republican, has attracted critical within the state and within his own party for his aggressive response to the COVID-19 outbreak. But he and Senatorial Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who defeated a case of childhood polio, and others of the time remember the importance of developing vaccines and inoculating on a large scale.
Martha Wilson, now 88 and a nursing student at Indiana University in the early 1950s, recalls nationwide relief when a polio vaccine was developed after years of job. She thinks some people today don’t appreciate “how quickly they got a COVID vaccine.” She doesn’t take for granted the return to a more secure life that allows for planning a big family reunion around Labor Day.
Kohchi had a different experience than most children of the 1950s. His mother, a follower of natural medicine like herbal treatments, did not have him vaccinated (Kohchi was vaccinated with adulthood). While her mother was an outlier back then, she would adjust to vaccine skeptics today.
DeWine thinks a key contrast between the 1960s and today, with his reluctance of so many Americans to get vaccinated, is that polio tended to plague children and had become many parents’ worst nightmare.
“I know our parents were relieved when we finally got vaccinated,” recalls Fran DeWine.
Her husband recently initiated a series of million dollar lotteries to increase the slowness of COVID-19 vaccination participation among Ohioans. President Joe Biden last week announced a “month of action” with incentives like free beer and sports tickets to drive America’s vaccinations.
Wigness blames today’s divisive politics and anti-science messages on talk shows and social media. Ferris, the teenager he mentors, says he sees criticism of mask-wearing and other precautions among some of his peers. Ferris says that the success of polio eradication “certainly means that there is a possibility that we can beat COVID, but that is entirely up to the people.”
Martha Wilson, who now lives in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, spoke about polio and COVID-19 during a recent Zoom call with her granddaughter, Hanna Wilson, 28, from suburban New York. She thought about treating patients’ iron lungs, a kind of ventilator used to treat polio.
“They were very confined. … It wasn’t a very pleasant life, ”Wilson says.
“I remember a book I read when I was little, ‘Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio’ by Peg Kehret. And it stuck with me, ”Hanna says. “And I remember iron lungs and things like that. But when I asked people about it, “Hey, do you remember what polio was? ” – nobody knew.”
Hanna, athletics administrator for the Big East Conference, was in Iran in December 2019 when she heard the first reports of a new virus in China. She was visiting a grandfather, Aboulfath Rohani, who would die there a few months later at the age of 97.
Back home, her job quickly changed. Matches, then tournaments, then entire seasons have been canceled.
“It opened my eyes,” she says. “So many people denied it was real, they hadn’t seen anything like it.”
She and her grandmother both point out that the nation suffered not only polio but also a deadly flu pandemic in 1918 which the estimated toll remains higher as COVID-19 in the United States and around the world.
“I hope we get out of this and that it will be just another chapter of the story,” says Hanna Wilson.
Martha Wilson says her mother-in-law survived the illness of the 1918 influenza pandemic and lived a long life.
“So that was a generation, polio was another generation, COVID is another,” she says. “I think they happened so far away that we forgot these things were happening. I think COVID took us by surprise.
“And now Hanna and her generation may be more aware when something else happens.”
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