Quote:
Originally Posted by RowingFiend
Nana, move to Japan or South Korea thx.
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I was born in the USA and I am not moving because you disagree with me about the vaccine. I am 75 years old and lived through other pandemics. I have had all my vaccines including this one. I lived through the polio epidemic way back in the old days (I was a child in the 1950s and 60s)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/med...cid=uxbndlbing
"In the early 1950s, before polio vaccines were available, polio outbreaks caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis each year," the agency's website reads. "Following introduction of vaccines—specifically, trivalent inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) in 1955 and trivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) in 1963—the number of polio cases fell rapidly to less than 100 in the 1960s and fewer than 10 in the 1970s."
The disease believed to have caused Franklin Delano Roosevelt's paralysis spread through contaminated food or water. If someone infected with polio shows symptoms, they most commonly have a fever, pain and vomiting. A percentage of cases spread to the central nervous system, leading to paralysis or death. If polio weakened a patient's ability to breathe, they could be placed in an iron lung, a type of respirator not often seen today.
Pittsburgh-area researcher Dr. Jonas Salk developed a cure that would soon be tested in perhaps the largest medical product test in the nation's history. Thanks to funding from the charity the March of Dimes, more than a million schoolchildren took part in a huge clinical trial.
The vaccinators came to Dr. Stephen Gluckman's elementary school when he was in second grade. He remembers lining up outside the school nurse's office.
"Everybody was scared because we knew it involved needles. And we marched in there one at a time, so nobody else could hear people crying, if they were," Gluckman said.
Dr. Jonas Salk stands in the University of Pittsburgh laboratory in which he developed a vaccine for polio.© Provided by NBC Philadelphia Dr. Jonas Salk stands in the University of Pittsburgh laboratory in which he developed a vaccine for polio.
He got his three shots spread out in that school year. Children received blood tests to check for immunity, and it took a year to collate and analyze the data from so many different local sources.
Then came a news conference, where Dr. Thomas Francis announced the Salk vaccine was "safe, potent and effective," to the relief of millions of frightened parents.
"Those three words were the headline of every newspaper in America," said Dr. Paul Offit, who heads the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Offit says the polio vaccination effort was "Warp Speed One." Doses were being manufactured before the trial was complete, allowing for larger supply than if manufacturers had waited for the trials and approvals to finish.
As luck would have it, Gluckman received the placebo as part of the study, and would have to go back for three shots of tried-and-tested vaccine. Though he might have felt unlucky, many felt joy.
"I think it has to be looked at in the context of how Americans thought of science at that time," March of Dimes archivist David Rose says in a video in The History of Vaccines, a project by The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. "It was the tail end of the McCarthy era, there was the Cold War paranoia, there was the fear of the atomic bomb, and here [Salk] was a hero, a real scientific hero that I think many Americans, ordinary Americans, could connect with. Because if nuclear war was feared during that time, polio was also highly feared, and here was the beginning of the end of that dreaded disease."
After the trials were complete, the March of Dimes and counties in the U.S. established clinics for children to get vaccinated. In the 1950s and '60s, Bucks County's health department had Well Child Clinics at schools, churches, an American Legion hall and a Quaker meeting house.
All these years later, the Mercer Museum in Doylestown holds the personal papers of Bernice M. Gorski, a nurse who worked in the clinics and administered polio shots. One letter from the health department asks her to work a monthly slate of clinics for $2.50 an hour.
There was also a considerable public health messaging effort encouraging parents to get their children vaccinated. The messaging needed to overcome some parents' skepticism after a batch of defective doses from Cutter Labs in California killed 10 children and infected tens of thousands (which Offit chronicled in a book).
Bucks County in May 1956 released a pamphlet calling the polio clinics "the best chance for protection before polio hits again, if vaccine is given now" to children six months to 14 years old, and to expectant mothers.
"As the supply of Salk vaccine increases, these as well as older children may be able to receive it through their family doctors," the pamphlet reads. It called for an immediate step up in vaccinations to "make a real dent in polio in 1956."
By mid-June of that year, more than half of the county's 42,000 children 14 and under had received at least one shot.
a group of people standing in front of a building: 6th May 1956: First injections for children against polio at a clinic in Hendon, Middlesex County, England. (Photo by Monty Fresco Jnr/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)© Provided by NBC Philadelphia 6th May 1956: First injections for children against polio at a clinic in Hendon, Middlesex County, England. (Photo by Monty Fresco Jnr/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
Gorski later received a handwritten letter of recognition from Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, thanking her for possessing the healing skills of the "Great Physician," a reference to Jesus Christ.
"That innate understanding has very often brought solace to those in pain and fear, especially timid school children," the Sisters wrote.
A few years after Salk's vaccine was approved, it became less common when Albert Sabin's vaccine was also shown to be effective in clinical trials. A dose of the Sabin vaccine could be put on a sugar cube with a dropper and it didn't require a professional to simply hand the cube to a child.
Philadelphia's Health Commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley, recalled his childhood experience getting that vaccine during a city news conference about the current pandemic.
"Everybody just lined up. You walked in, they handed you a sugar cube, you swallowed it and walked on. Each person was a few seconds," Farley said.
The CDC now reports that since 1979, no cases of polio have originated in the U.S.
"However, the virus has been brought into the country by travelers with polio. The last time this happened was in 1993," according to the CDC's website.
Do you think that people were scared of the polio vaccine? You bet they were, but they were more scared of polio.
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