{"id":269989,"date":"2021-06-08T23:20:13","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T20:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/when-vaccines-and-re-emergence-were-just-as-daunting\/"},"modified":"2021-06-08T23:20:13","modified_gmt":"2021-06-08T20:20:13","slug":"when-vaccines-and-re-emergence-were-just-as-daunting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/when-vaccines-and-re-emergence-were-just-as-daunting\/","title":{"rendered":"#When vaccines and re-emergence were just as daunting"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#When vaccines and re-emergence were just as daunting<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

CINCINNATI \u2014 The COVID-19 pandemic and the distribution of the vaccines that will prevent it have surfaced haunting memories for Americans who lived through an earlier time when the country was swept by a virus that, for so long, app<\/a>eared to have no cure or way to prevent it.<\/p>\n

They were children then. They had friends or classmates who became wheelchair-bound or dragged legs with braces. Some went to hospitals to use iron lungs they needed to breathe. Some never came home.<\/p>\n

Now they are older adults. Again, they find themselves in what has been one of the hardest-hit age groups, just as they were as children in the polio era. They are sharing their memories with today\u2019s younger people as a lesson of hope for the emergence from COVID-19.<\/p>\n

Clyde Wigness, a retired University of Vermont professor active in a mentoring program, recently told 13-year-old Ferris Giroux about the history of polio during their weekly Zoom call. Families and schools saved coins to contribute to the \u201cMarch of Dimes\u201d to fund anti-polio efforts, he recalled, and the nation celebrated successful vaccine tests.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as the vaccine came out, everybody jumped on it and got it right away,\u201d recounts Wigness, 84, a native of Harlan, Iowa. \u201cEverybody got on the bandwagon, and basically it was eradicated in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A
A girl swallows a lump of sugar coated with a dose of the Sabin polio vaccine, served in a paper cup in Atlanta.<\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, before vaccines were available, polio outbreaks caused more than\u00a015,000 cases of paralysis<\/a>\u00a0each year, with U.S. deaths peaking at 3,145 in 1952. Outbreaks led to quarantines and travel<\/a> restrictions. Soon after vaccines became widely available, American cases and death tolls plummeted to hundreds a year, then dozens in the 1960s. In 1979, polio was eradicated in the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo really, what I would love for people to be reassured about is that there have been lots of times in history when things haven\u2019t gone the way we\u2019ve expected them to,\u201d says Joaniko Kohchi, director of Adelphi University\u2019s Institute for Parenting. \u201cWe adapt, and our children will have skills and strengths and resiliencies that we didn\u2019t have.\u201d<\/p>\n

While today\u2019s children learned to stay at home and attend school remotely, wear masks when they went anywhere and frequently use hand sanitizer, many of their grandparents remember childhood summers dominated by concern about the airborne virus, which was also spread through feces. Some parents banned their kids from public swimming pools and neighborhood playgrounds and avoided large gatherings.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolio was something my parents were very scared of,\u201d says Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, now 74. \u201cMy dad was a big baseball fan, but very careful not to take me into big crowds \u2026 my Dad\u2019s friend thought his son caught it at a Cardinals game<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

A 1955 news<\/a>paper photo surfaced recently showing DeWine becoming one of the first second-graders in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to get a vaccination shot. His future wife, Fran Struewing, was a classmate who got hers that day, too. Sixty-six years later, they got the COVID-19 vaccination shots together.<\/p>\n

DeWine, a Republican,\u00a0has drawn <\/a>criticism<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>within the state and his own party for his aggressive response to the COVID-19 outbreak. But he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who overcame\u00a0a childhood case of polio<\/a>, and others of that time remember the importance of developing vaccines and of widespread inoculations.<\/p>\n

\"second-graders
Second-graders at St. Vibiana\u2019s school are inoculated against polio with the Salk vaccine in Los Angeles. <\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Martha Wilson, now 88 and a student nurse at Indiana University in the early 1950s, remembers the nationwide relief when a polio vaccine was developed after years of work. She thinks some people today don\u2019t appreciate \u201chow rapidly they got a vaccine for COVID.\u201d She doesn\u2019t take for granted returning to the kind of safer life that allows for planning a big family reunion around Labor Day.<\/p>\n

Kohchi had a different experience than most children of the 1950s. Her mother, a believer in natural medicine such as herbal treatments, didn\u2019t have her vaccinated (Kohchi got vaccinated as an adult). While her mother was an outlier then, she would fit in with today\u2019s vaccine skeptics.<\/p>\n

DeWine thinks a key contrast between the 1960s and today, with its reluctance of so many Americans to get vaccinated, is that polio tended to afflict children and had become many parents\u2019 worst nightmare.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know our parents were relieved when we were finally going to get a shot,\u201d Fran DeWine recalls.<\/p>\n

Her husband recently initiated\u00a0a series of $1 million lotteries\u00a0<\/a>to pump up sluggish COVID-19 vaccination participation among Ohioans. President Joe Biden last week\u00a0announced a \u201cmonth of action\u201d<\/a>\u00a0with incentives such as free beer and sports tickets to drive U.S. vaccinations.<\/p>\n

\"This
This photo of the Yellow Springs News issue from April 28, 1955, that was provided by the Yellow Springs News, shows then second-grader Mike DeWine, center, as he is helped to his polio shot by county health nurse Kathern Lane, left, and Dr. Meinhard Robinow. <\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wigness blames today\u2019s divisive politics and anti-science<\/a> messages spread over talk shows and social media<\/a>. Ferris, the teen he mentors, says he sees criticism of mask-wearing and other precaution among some of his peers. Ferris says the polio eradication success \u201ccertainly means it\u2019s possible we can beat COVID, but it entirely depends on people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Martha Wilson, now living in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, talked about polio and COVID-19 in a recent Zoom call with her granddaughter, Hanna Wilson, 28, of suburban New York. She reflected on treating patients iron lungs, a kind of ventilator used to treat polio.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were very confining. \u2026 It was not a very nice life,\u201d says Wilson.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember a book I read when I was a little kid, `Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio,\u2032 by Peg Kehret. And it stuck with me,\u201d Hanna says. \u201cAnd I remember the iron lungs and things like that. But when I asked people about it \u2014 \u2018Hey, do you remember what polio was?\u2019 \u2014 no one knew.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"This
This photograph of a computer screen during a virtual interview on April 9, 2021, shows Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, right, as he sits with his wife Fran DeWine while she holds a printed copy of the Yellow Springs News issue page from April 28, 1955, that shows DeWine as a then second-grader, while receiving his polio vaccination. <\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hanna, an athletics administrator for the Big East Conference, happened to be 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 age 97.<\/p>\n

Back home, her job was quickly transformed. Games, then tournaments, then entire seasons were canceled.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been eye-opening,\u2032 she says. \u201cSo many people denied that it was real, they hadn\u2019t seen anything like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both she and her grandmother point out that the nation endured not only polio but a deadly flu pandemic in 1918 whose\u00a0estimated toll remains higher<\/a>\u00a0than COVID-19\u2032s both in the United States and globally.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m hopeful we will come out of this and it will be just another chapter in history,\u201d Hanna Wilson says.<\/p>\n

Martha Wilson says her mother-in-law survived illness from the 1918 flu pandemic and lived a long life.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that was one generation, polio was another generation, COVID\u2019s another,\u201d she says. \u201cI think they happened so far apart that we\u2019d forgotten that these things do happen. I think COVID caught us by surprise.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd now Hanna and her generation will be maybe more aware when something else comes along.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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