Polio came to five-year-old Lynn Lane while she was visiting her grandmother in rural Indiana. Suddenly her arms and legs became weak and when she was taken to a hospital in Indianapolis, she was completely paralyzed and suffering from respiratory failure. Lane spent the next few months in an iron lung.
“I don’t really remember much of it,” Lane, now 73, told me Monday from her home north of Sacramento. “The only memories I really have are mostly at night. You could hear the roar of all the iron lungs.”
Lane's family moved to Northern California a few years after she contracted polio when she was eight years old. “That’s when I realized I was different from other kids,” she said. “I wore leg braces and had to relearn how to walk.”
Her parents took her to Shriners Hospital in San Francisco, where she lived off and on for the next eight years.
“It was kind of like boarding school, except there were surgeries,” Lane said. “They did all these muscle and tendon transfers. I think I had maybe 15 to 18 surgeries. She transferred my quadriceps front to back so I could stand.”
In her early 40s, Lane was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, which affects between 25 and 40 percent of childhood polio survivors. It is similar to chronic fatigue syndrome and can be mild to debilitating.
“I’m not in a wheelchair yet,” said Lane, who uses leg braces and crutches, “but it’s going in that direction.”
The idea that anyone would now question the polio vaccine “drives me crazy,” she said.
Last week, reported the New York Times that in 2022 Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s lawyer and close advisor Aaron Siri had applied to the Food and Drug Administration to revoke the approval of the polio vaccine, which has been used for three decades, until its safety can be further studied in an unvaccinated control group. Kennedy, who was chosen by President-elect Donald Trump to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, is a long-time vaccine skeptic WHO spits nonsense about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and many other things. He is, according to many medical professionals a threat to public health.
The Times report sent shockwaves. Before Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine By the mid-1950s, the disease killed or paralyzed more than half a million people around the world every year. Many prominent Americans suffered from polio in childhood, including the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and the actor Mia FarrowHe immediately condemned the questioning of the vaccine. Kennedy and Trump were forced to reassure Americans that they supported the life-saving treatment.
When Kennedy met with Republican senators this week to shore up support for his nomination, he told reporters this he is “all for” the polio vaccine. Trump said at his first press conference after the election: insisted“You won’t lose the polio vaccine.” That won’t happen.”
And yet Trump insisted on it too to spread the oft-debunked lie that childhood vaccinations are linked to autism and vowed to “look into” the conspiracy theory. Kennedy, he said, “will come back with a report on what he thinks. We'll find out a lot.”
This scaremongering is unscrupulous. We already know a lot. In fact, we know more than a lot.
The autism issue has been “researched in some ways in great detail,” said Richard Pan, a pediatrician and former California state senator who led the successful 2015 campaign to eliminate a “personal belief” exemption from vaccination requirements for the state's schoolchildren directed.
“Do we know what causes autism? Not yet,” said Pan. But, he added, we know what that means not Cause of autism: the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine involved a long-discredited work from 1998 based on 12 cases of the dismissed English doctor Andrew Wakefield.
“What will it take to convince Trump and RFK Jr. that a retracted 12-subject study with falsified data was actually wrong?” asked Pan.
In any case, he added, blaming the vaccine is an “ableist” response to autism by some parents. “They don’t want to accept that their child is neurodivergent,” Pan said. “You want to say that your child is broken and my life is ruined and that it’s Big Pharma or whoever’s fault.”
People who don't vaccinate their children are endangering the health of the very people they are supposed to protect, he said.
“You’re playing with your children’s lives,” he said. “All of these adults have already been vaccinated.”
Although polio has been essentially eradicated in the United States, it still exists in parts of the world and could certainly make a comeback here if enough people refuse to vaccinate their children. In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this an unvaccinated New Yorker was sick with polio. And earlier this year, in the midst of Israel's war against Hamas, a 10-month-old child in Gaza became infected with the virus, confirming fears about the war's possible impact on preventable childhood diseases.
Regarding the Kennedy adviser's petition, Pan said: How could we withhold a potentially life-saving treatment from children in a control group to test the effectiveness of a vaccine that has been used successfully for decades?
“Sometimes a process cannot be done safely or ethically,” he said. “Are you ready to volunteer? your child in the control group?”
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