As August approached in the summer of 1952, I was looking forward to returning for second grade at Holy Rosary Elementary in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Classes would begin in the middle of the month because there would be a two-week break at the end of September when schools closed for the potato harvest and I would turn 7. Mechanical harvesters only scooped up about 80% of the “taters” and the fields swarmed with kids gleaning tubers that had been missed. You could keep as many as you wanted to store at home for the winter or turn them in for a dime per bag. I would be surprised to learn this annual ritual has survived into the 21st century.

It was the second summer rumors of polio outbreaks haunted adult conversations, but the threat always seemed to be elsewhere. A half-dozen boys, including my twin brother and I, had built a treehouse in one of the cottonwoods that marched along the irrigation ditch that wound its way through our neighborhood earlier in the summer. Vicki was the only girl our age on the block and while she watched us tack steps onto the cottonwood’s trunk it wasn’t clear there would be a place for her in the boys’ club we were preparing. After considerable heated debate, we decided she could join.

It was Vicki’s mother who was first whisked away in an ambulance that month, a victim of the poliomyelitis virus which emerged in Idaho Falls as a bulbar polio variant attacking the nerves controlling breathing muscles in the throat and chest. Soon we heard Vicki’s mother was in an “iron lung” which was breathing for her. I think when you are still quite young, the scariest thing that can occur is when you recognize your parents are scared. Later that week as I began running a fever nearing 105 degrees, I could see the panic in their eyes. I was rushed to the hospital where I would slip in and out of consciousness for several weeks including some periods in an iron lung as well. Neither Vicki nor my brother, Richard fell ill.

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Polio was an arbitrary infection, mild in more than 90% of cases but disastrous, even fatal, in a fraction attacking the nervous system. Nonetheless, the Idaho Falls hospital was overflowing in 1952 with children in various stages of distress. In a few weeks I was home, weak but seemingly undamaged. It was known even asymptomatic victims could remain infectious for up to six weeks, so it would be nearly Thanksgiving before I returned to school. My brother brought lessons and homework home to me. It would be another month before Vicki’s Mom returned, a young woman, still in her 20s, whose hair had turned snow white. For the remainder of my school years, even into college, there were reminders of the pre-vaccine ravages of polio as classmates wore leg braces or suffered withered limbs caused by “acute flaccid paralysis.”

The bulbospinal variant consigned some victims to iron lungs for the remainder of their lives. Paul Alexander, who was also stricken at age 6, spent 70 years in an iron lung, only passing in 2024. Despite this confinement, he became a lawyer and enjoyed a reasonably full life eventually being able to leave his chamber for a few hours each day. He even became something of a TikTok celebrity in his final years. I also recall a national bridge champion who played his cards while recumbent in an iron lung in the 1960s. In recent years, scarily enough, there has been evidence of a rare, post-polio syndrome that causes the disease to reappear. I can’t help wondering whether my friend, Dennis Williams, who also had polio as a child and passed away from dementia last year may have been another instance of this lingering risk.

Science isn’t perfect and scientists aren’t infallible, but vaccines are perhaps the greatest savior of human life in all of medical history. They’ve cut infant mortality by 40% and saved 154 million lives during the past half-century protecting us against 14 common pathogens. Aurelia Nguyen, chief program officer at GAVI, the international Vaccine Alliance, is quoted in November’s Scientific American, “We say vaccines are one of humanity’s great achievements in terms of having furthered the lifespan and life quality for humanity over the past 50 years.” During the period when so many young people were advocating a return to the simplicity of rural life, joining communes, one comedian observed, “They want to return to the Middle Ages taking vaccines with them.”

President-elect Donald Trump has proposed a vaccine skeptic to run the American health care system. What a travesty that would be. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has alleged polio vaccines carry a Simian Virus 40 that cause soft-tissue cancers which “killed many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” This is absolutely bonkers, linking vaccine trials on rhesus monkeys to paranoid fears of inter-species infection. The final year before the Salk polio vaccine became widely available following a decade of research funded by Franklin Roosevelt’s March of Dimes campaign, there were 350,000 reported polio cases and 13,000 deaths. Last year, worldwide, there were just 13 cases — those confined along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border where religious fanatics assassinate health care workers delivering the vaccine. Still, mothers trudge through the night with their infants to seek protection.

Smallpox was eradicated in my lifetime — the last recorded case occurring in Somalia in 1977. Effective malaria vaccines, the biggest killer of sub-Saharan children in Africa, are on their way. The director of the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation observes, “There are very few things women will walk hours and hours for, but vaccines are still one of them.” The British journal Lancet estimates COVID vaccinations prevented 20 million excess deaths once they became available. Scientific American notes, “Extremist legislators in Ohio… have given politicians the right to revoke any rule from the state’s health department designed to limit the spread of contagious disease.” Kennedy would like to extend similar authority nationwide. This would be lunacy. Parents who deny their children vaccines put not only them at risk but endanger everyone’s children as well. Alas, there’s no known vaccine that inoculates against ignorance or stupidity.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.