As the measles epidemic spreads to more people, more states, and more countries, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s dangerous claims about the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) provoke outrage and anguish. It is thus easy to forget that Kennedy has questioned the safety and efficacy of all vaccines, including the one for polio. After his nomination as health secretary, he promised, “You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. That’s not going to happen.” His earlier comments, however, were very different. In 2024, he made the outlandish claim that after the polio vaccine was introduced it may have caused a slew of cancers “that killed many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” He also said that the belief that the vaccine resulted in a dramatic decline in polio cases is a “mythology.”
Those remarks explain why Mitch McConnell, who was silent about most of Trump’s nominees, criticized Kennedy. “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed,” McConnell wrote. “They’re dangerous.” McConnell had polio as a child before a vaccine was available. He still walks with a limp. Many people who lived through the polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s without becoming sick shared McConnell’s fear of Kennedy’s confirmation. I know because I was one of them.
Fear of polio was omnipresent when I was a child. When word about new cases spread, swimming pools closed; summer camps sent children home. A boy who lived in my neighborhood recalled his refusal to walk down a street where someone had contracted the disease. Polio “was a plague,” he recalled later. “That’s how I saw it. If someone had it, you would go in the opposite direction. Turn around and go as far away from it as you could.”
Although my mother often deprecated symptoms that later proved serious, she did not hesitate to call the doctor when my younger sister complained of a stiff neck—one of the salient symptoms of polio. I remember the doctor rushing to our house to perform a spinal tap, the standard but painful and dangerous diagnostic procedure to detect the polio virus. I never will forget my father’s terror as he held his daughter in her bed after being warned that any movement could result in total paralysis. Fortunately, she stayed still, and the test was negative. But we had learned the randomness of fate and understood more clearly than before that no child was safe.
In 1954, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later called the March of Dimes), founded in 1938 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most famous U.S. polio survivor, launched the largest clinical trial the world had ever known to test Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. It is difficult to imagine parents today allowing children to participate in such a trial without first asking innumerable questions and demanding written confirmation that the investigators had followed all safeguards. But this was before informed consent became a universally accepted ethical concept in medicine. Moreover, the March of Dimes had galvanized the entire population. Most parents wanted to do anything they could to combat this dread disease. My parents were no exception. A first grader at the time, my younger brother lined up with his classmates to get the injections.
The memoirs of two survivors I knew as a young child helped me understand the reality of lives struck by polio. One of my parents’ friends was a woman who was 29 and married with two small children when doctors diagnosed her with the disease. An ambulance rushed her to the one hospital in her city that would take polio cases; she spent ten weeks in isolation there. She remembered delirium and excruciating pain. “I felt like a leper,” she later wrote, “and looked worse. Tubes protruded from every orifice….For three weeks I was given intravenous feedings….I wanted to die.” When she finally left isolation, physical therapy began. Like many other patients, she hated the hot pack routine, intended to stretch her muscles. The therapist “would get me all set for the works and then go to the hot pack room where the drab green blanket-like stuff was cooking. As she picked up the first horrid, steaming piece and dropped it fast, she’d come to the conclusion that it was just about the right temperature for me. And I considered myself lucky when I wasn’t burned. I was in constant fear of this.” Later she spent many months at the Warm Springs Medical center, the famous Georgia rehabilitation facility Roosevelt founded. When she finally left, she realized that she would have to live with “very real problems.” She subsequently received rehabilitation at other facilities, but for the rest of her life she remained in a wheelchair, could breathe from only one lung, had limited use of one arm and hand, coped with serious kidney problems, and had to stay in a hospital bed most of the time.
I knew the other survivor, Karen Chase, much better because we lived a few blocks from each other, were the same age, and went to the same elementary school. In 1950, she was one of the girls with whom I organized a polio benefit. The March of Dimes encouraged children as well as adults to contribute to their crusade, so my friends and I did our part. The local newspaper reported, “The police today are in possession of an envelope containing $3.08 which was delivered to them yesterday by seven girls, all approximately seven years old, who asked that the money be turned over to the March of Dimes. They revealed that the money represented the proceeds of a puppet show which they had conducted and that they wanted to give it to help less fortunate children.”
Three years later, Karen displayed some dangerous symptoms, and a doctor arrived at her house to perform a spinal tap. Holding the fluid up to the light, he saw indications of polio and rushed her to the hospital. Because she had difficulty breathing, she was placed in an iron lung, a respirator developed in 1928, where she hovered between life and death for many days. She later recalled that she felt “claustrophobic, paralyzed in the iron cage.” She seemed to be “in space” with “nothing called day, nothing called night.” When physical therapy began, a mechanical pulley lowered her into a whirlpool. She imagined herself as a “princess thrown in, sacrificed.” In her case, rehabilitation seemed to produce the desired result. Three months after she fell ill, she was able to breathe on her own, stand unassisted, and get in and out of her wheelchair by herself. When she finally could walk, she returned to school.
A year later, however, she was back in bed, immobilized in a full-body cast. Because the disease had weakened the muscles on one side more than the other, she developed such severe scoliosis that doctors warned she could damage her heart. After weeks of straightening her back in a cast, surgeons operated to fuse her spin. She then spent a year in the cast at home while her spine healed.
Karen was still in the hospital on the morning of April 12, 1955, when the public learned that the Salk vaccine was effective. Today, it’s impossible to imagine how momentous that announcement was. One Salk biographer wrote that “people observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked in brief periods of tribute, took the rest of the day off, closed their schools or convoked fervid assemblies therein, drank toasts, hugged children, attended church, smiled at strangers, forgave enemies.” Newscaster Frank Deford recalled thinking, “We were safe again….We had conquered polio.”
The public’s faith in medical science has diminished significantly since that halcyon day in 1955. A critical reason is the growing awareness that many remedies initially hailed as miracle cures failed to deliver on their promise. It is clear, however, that the Salk vaccine, followed by the vaccine developed by Albert Sabin, was a remarkable achievement, eradicating polio in the western hemisphere. Indeed, one reason Americans can be so cavalier about vaccines today is that they never have encountered some of the most fearsome diseases. The prospect of a resurgence of polio as a result of loosened vaccine requirements or Kennedy’s dangerous claims should terrify us all.
Sources
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “McConnell Defends Polio Vaccine, an Apparent Warning to Kennedy,” New York Times, December 13, 2024.
Christine Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “What Kennedy Has Said about the Polio Vaccine in Recent Years,” New York Times, December 17, 2024.
Daniel Payne, “‘The Same Bobby Kennedy’: How RFK’s Vaccine Criticism Came Rushing Back,” Statnews, April 16, 2025.
Emily K. Abel, Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
Karen Chase, Polio Boulevard: A Memoir (State University of New York Press, 2014).
David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Naomi Rogers, Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Daniel J. Wilson, Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
Emily K. Abel is professor emerita at the UCLA-Fielding School of Public Health. Her most recent book is Gluten Free for Life: Celiac Disease, Medical Recognition, and the Food Industry (NYU Press, 2025).
My former husband had polio as an infant (born 6/20/1949) and had 3 surgeries before age 6 to enable him to walk. He died last year and had been suffering from post polio syndrome.
I met a friend’s mother in 1968 who was in an iron lung after her diagnosis to which she was confined for the rest of her life.
I fear we will see polio and other diseases return with a vengeance as parents choose to not inoculate their children and non vaxers like Kennedy allege that inoculations are causing other problems in children, for which there is no proof.
The fear of polio was real—and justified. But the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later the March of Dimes) also knew how to amplify that fear. It was part of their strategy, and it worked: the public rallied, funds poured in, and two vaccines were developed.
Do we still use fear to drive public health campaigns? And if so—does it work?