Vaccinations and Lessons From the Past

On April 26, 1954 the Salk polio vaccine field trials began.  It was the first time a “double blind” trial was used for a drug.  The now standard double blind study (where neither the patient nor the doctor know who is getting the real medicine as opposed to a placebo) involved almost 2 million children.  It began at Franklin Sherman Elementary School, an integrated school in McLean, Virginia.  The expanded study involved children from the United States, Canada and Finland.

            I think the trials conducted in an integrated school reflect the largesse and truly humanitarian thinking of Dr. Jonas Salk himself.  The son of immigrant-Russian Ashkenazi Jews, Salk knew what mindless prejudice and institutionalized bias looked and felt like.  Salk was a risk taker.  He used a dead virus when common thinking assumed a live but weakened virus was better.  He tried the vaccine for the first time on himself and his son.  When it proved successful he refused to patent the vaccine, saying it belonged to the people.  Dr. Jonas Salk was a man who didn’t just talk the talk; he walked the walk.

            By 1955 the vaccine was ready for common use and wide-spread vaccinations began.  A disease that turned healthy people into cripples, put laughing children into iron lungs and even brought down (and then lifted up) a rising Democratic star called Franklin Delano Roosevelt would no more ravage the country. 

I was 10 years old in 1956 when my father lined up his four children and marched us into Dr. Perry’s office near Sloan’s Lake in north Denver.  We must have looked like a row of ducks.  We were there to begin our series of four shots which would guard us against the most feared disease in America, polio.  Polio may not have been the deadliest disease in the country, but it was the most feared.  Now there was a vaccine against it and my father was going to make sure we got that protection.

            I don’t know what bills went unpaid for those shots, but I know there was no money for them, so Peter was robbed to pay Paul.  You must understand that prior to our arriving in Denver, where both Mom and Dad finally found work, things had been rather difficult for my family.  There had been a time when our “home” was a car that took us from place to place while Dad looked for work.  Supper meant stopping at a grocery store for a loaf of bread, a paper of sliced bologna and some apples.  School was a come and go proposition.  I generally refer to these times as the dark years.  But in 1956 we had found our feet and were starting a long climb back up the socio-economic ladder.  Yet, despite all of this, when that polio vaccine became available, Dad took upon himself the responsibility for his children.  My mother fretted about the cost, but we were given the shots, and other bills were paid late.  At no time was there a discussion of health care being a “right.”  Instead, care for the children you produce was considered a responsibility.    

            The anniversary of Dr. Salk’s trials passed this week.  This medical pioneer, and my father’s reaction to Salk’s discovery, are a history that involves more personal initiative and less governmental direction than people today are used to.  We can do a great deal on our own.  We should depend more on ourselves and less on some amorphous, only marginally benign “presence.”  Big brother didn’t cure polio, a doctor did.  The government didn’t get my family vaccinated, my father took that responsibility upon himself. 

This is not to say that the government, in all its forms, is unnecessary or unwelcome.  But neither is it the font of all that is good.  We work best when we find the balance between what can be done by ourselves and what should be done by a larger, more collective, entity.  Rely first on yourself and then on ever larger spheres of support.  Why?  Because that which is shared may also be withheld. 

            Trust yourself and keep the faith.