Remember when you learned history in school years ago, and found out how short people's lives used to be? If you reached your forties and fifties, you were old. Famous Americans like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin defied the odds — Franklin hit 84, while Adams lived to 90. But thanks to disease, lack of clean water, and poor working conditions, most folks checked out early.
Then along came modern times, with our amazing advances in sanitation, safety on the job, healthcare for kids, and — yes! — vaccines. Inoculations against a variety of maladies contributed significantly to humans' length (and quality) of life. Eradicating smallpox was a huge victory. And another, as any student of the American Presidency knows, was polio.
Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio when he was 39, after visiting a Boy Scout camp near Bear Mountain, New York. For the rest of his life, he never walked again — but because of the cooperation of a more-genteel press, the majority of Americans never realized it. Photos of FDR in his wheelchair, like this one taken at Hyde Park, are few and far between. Roosevelt made sure of it, because polio terrified people. Voters may not have understood that someone stricken with it could lead them out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War II.
But thanks to science and two brilliant dudes — one a first-generation American, the other an immigrant — polio was beaten with a vaccine. It was first given as an injection and then (you may remember) as a drop of vaccine on a sugar cube. Thanks, Dr. Salk! Thanks, Dr. Sabin!
Today, unbelievably, Team Trump and the odious vaccine opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are trying to turn back the clock on polio. This will literally kill people — especially children — and it's way past time for the medical community to step up and cry foul. As for Franklin Roosevelt, he and First Lady Eleanor were very wary of the Kennedys. RFK Jr.'s antics have perhaps shed additional light on why. We cats HISS.
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