My Turn: Just say no to polio and RFK Jr.

The emergency polio ward at Haynes Memorial Hospital in Boston on Aug. 16, 1955, jammed with people in iron lung respirators. The city's polio epidemic hit a high of 480 cases. AP
Published: 12-18-2024 9:03 PM |
It’s the summer of 1950. I live in Laredo, Texas with my mother, father, and 14-year-old brother, Jerry. I’m 4 years old. One day, seemingly out of the blue, my parents sat me down and told me that my brother was hospitalized and was not returning home anytime soon.
I don’t remember my reaction, but I’m guessing it was a feeling of great sadness. Jerry was everything to me. He was diagnosed with polio and confined to an iron lung. There was no immediate cure for polio, which was highly infectious. You either recovered or you died. If you recovered, you might be paralyzed for the rest of your life.
A burning memory was that I was not allowed to see him in his hospital room. In the 1950s polio was at near epidemic levels, and it was affecting many children and young people. Jerry was placed in a ward with other polio patients in iron lungs, which was the protocol at the time. The one time I was allowed to see him, he was wheeled in his iron lung to a window on the first floor of the hospital, where I could see him and talk to him briefly through an open window. I was both happy and terrified.
Later in life, I learned that the physician gave my mother a choice that might help my brother recover. The physician could not guarantee that my brother would live more than six months without treatment. If he lived, he could guarantee that Jerry would be paralyzed and without the use of one leg.
However, promising vaccine research was being done by a physician, Dr. Jonas Salk. Dr. Salk was looking for people with polio who would agree to have the experimental vaccine. Jerry was my mother’s child and had not yet been adopted by my father. For my mother, it wasn’t a choice. She said yes. They injected the vaccine component directly into his bloodstream with transfusions. Jerry was out of the hospital within eight weeks and expected to recover fully. He did and he was not paralyzed, except one leg was slightly shorter than the other.
I wish there were a happier ending to the life of Jerry Davis. He went on to live a full but short life. He joined the U.S. Navy in the late 1950s and became a flight simulator instructor with a government clearance, married his high school sweetheart, and had four children, my three nieces and a nephew, who was 9 months old when his father died.
What got Jerry in the end was an icy road in Newport, Rhode Island where he was stationed at the Naval Air Base. He was driving home in his beloved MG in the early morning hours when he hit an ice patch, ran into a stone fence, and rolled over into a nearby field. He was in the hospital for a week, with two badly broken legs and internal injuries. He was conscious and could say goodbye to my mother, father, and his wife, who was a nurse at that hospital. I arrived from Texas too late to say goodbye. He was 29 years old.
There is much to be concerned about as we head into another four-year term of Donald Trump as president. Among the concerns are most of the people he is picking to lead major federal agencies. It’s as if he’s laughing at us all while choosing the accelerant to burn it all down.
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For me, the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services is one of the worst, because of, among other reasons, his stance on vaccinations — in particular, a petition to the FDA by Kennedy’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, to revoke approval of the polio vaccine.
Polio still exists, although it has been nearly eradicated in the United States because of our decades-long practice of vaccinating our children against many highly contagious diseases, including polio. Nevertheless, we are seeing a small uptick in cases here in this country, beginning in 2022 in a young unvaccinated man in New York state.
In America, people are allowed to be unvaccinated, especially if there are religious objections. COVID-19 may have been the exception. But for those who are not anti-vaccine or who don’t have religious objections, our choice to receive vaccinations should be protected. I hope you’ll join me in telling our Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren to oppose the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as secretary of Health and Human Services.
Roxann Wedegartner is a former mayor of Greenfield.