vaccines – Susan Feathers

“Though I’d never forgotten Alan, I hadn’t uttered his name aloud in the many years since he’d died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio.”
― Philip Roth, Nemesis

The dangerous vaccine policies of the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., heralds the grave risk of the Trump Administration’s reckless retreat from science to embrace unscientific beliefs which currently threaten children’s lives.

Our Children at Risk

Polio was eliminated from the United States by 1997. I remember when polio terrified every parent and my sister Beverly and me were 5 and 7 – the most at risk for the polio virus. Vaccines and immunological science and medical practice were in the infant stages of learning how to prevent many viral vectors emerging as public health crises in the early 1950s.

I was born in 1945 in July, one month before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which finally ended WWII.

My father had joined the U.S. Army Air Corps after Japan attacked America at Pearl Harbor. Three months after I was born, my father returned from the war theater, joined the new U.S. Air Force, and began my life’s experience in a military family, moving about every two years around the U.S. and Hawai’i.

To understand how Americans lived during that time, imagine very little access to health care, no vaccines against many childhood diseases (measles, mumps, diphtheria, whooping cough) — many diseases few American children have contracted for at least the last 75 years of modern medicine.

Mothers, the primary healthcare providers, may have 2-6 children all sick with the same infectious disease and no one cure except aspirin, Pepto-Bismol, moist wash clothes and orange juice. Woman labored day and night to keep their children alive. High fevers from rubella, for example, often conferred blindness and/or hearing loss in children.

My parents were so fearful of their daughters contracting polio, they petitioned the Air Force when we were living in Texas for a transfer to Los Angeles where the infectious rate was lower. They were transferred thus saving Beverly and I from infection until the Salk vaccine was offered to children in the 1952 trial with a killed virus vaccine that resulted in immunity to the live virus.

In the bizarre and surprising way that fate confers destiny, I studied Special Education in graduate school on a full scholarship from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) at the University of Tennessee. There I studied deaf education to join the workforce as an educator for deaf and hard of hearing students affected by rubella in the 60s.

Likewise, when I later joined the Arizona State University’s Disability for Students Resource Center, one of my colleagues who had contracted polio as a child in the 1950s epidemic shared his journey with me as he began to experience a return of symptoms as an adult. He lost the use of his legs and began to experience difficulty breathing, both of which affected his ability to thrive.

Young Families: Pay Attention to Facts

I tell this story for young American parents who are doubtful about vaccines for infants and young children. Embracing the belief held by the current Sec. of Health and Human Services that vaccine schedules for children – recommended by the American Academy for Pediatrics – have caused the rise in number of autistic children is dangerous. That has been proven wrong. Protect your children with proven vaccines that prevent these dangerous diseases. I lived it. I know.

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