Musings: Seeing boy on sideline showed polio's dangers

Shortly after the federal government approved the Salk polio vaccine in 1955, I joined the tidal wave of youngsters vaccinated against polio.

Not surprisingly perhaps, my parents expressed more urgency about having me vaccinated than I did. While I’d heard about polio, I hadn’t grasped its seriousness. I knew of no one who had the disease. I listened with half an ear to conversations about it.

But two years later, I saw firsthand the painful reality of polio. On a beautiful spring afternoon, I was playing kickball with other 8-year-olds in the schoolyard of Stewart Manor School. We were having a great time, running and jumping with enthusiasm.

Off in the distance, though, a boy in a wheelchair looked on quietly. I asked one of my female teammates about him and learned that he was her older brother. She said he had gotten polio before the vaccine had become available and almost died.

Though his health had gradually improved, he was still not strong enough to get around without leg braces or a wheelchair. But he liked being with kids, so he sometimes came with his sister and mother to the schoolyard to watch others play.

It upset me that a young person — just slightly older than me — could hardly walk, much less run. I was frightened. I wasn’t prepared to see kids in wheelchairs.

Though I saw him a few more times after that day, I never found out whether he fully recovered. A year later, his family moved away. But I’ve never forgotten him — or the destructiveness of polio. And I’ve wondered what his life might have been like had he been vaccinated.

These days there’s no shortage of vaccine skeptics in our midst, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s been nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy says he supports the polio vaccine, though he has expressed doubts about its effectiveness and aligned himself with people also critical of it.

I wish the naysayers could have seen that unvaccinated child in the wheelchair who, long ago, watched kids his age experience the joys of youth. Maybe our conversation about vaccines would be different now.

— Richard J. Conway, Massapequa