(Long Read)

It was the late spring of 1957. I was six, just about to turn seven. One afternoon, I was walking home from school when I suddenly began to feel pain in my legs and shoulder.

Our house in the temporary Smeltersite settlement in the new town of Kitimat, British Columbia was uphill from the school.

By the time I was halfway up the hill the pain had become so severe that I could barely walk. I stopped every few steps in hopes of easing the pain and catching my breath.

My mother would later tell me she glanced out the window and saw me limping and stopping, limping and stopping.

She came out of the house to help me home and immediately called the doctor. His urgent instructions were to get me to the hospital as soon as possible and he would meet us at the entrance. He mentioned the then dreaded word “polio.”

My mother called my father at work who then drove us in the five-minute drive to the local hospital.

Now let’s consider what I mean by hospital. In 1957, Kitimat was a new town, under construction. The Smeltersite community was temporary accommodation and so was the hospital (a modern hospital was under construction at what was then called the townsite).

The hospital building was no different from many of the other temporary office buildings created for the construction site. Using the lessons and technology from the Second World War era, the hospital was well equipped. It was the baby boom, and the maternity ward was state of the art (according to social media posts by now senior citizens who were born there.) What the hospital did not have was an isolation ward. Evacuation would have been difficult. There were two ways in or out at the time, by float plane or ship. A railway link was just being completed and there was as yet no highway.

All alone

That is how I ended up in a bed in an alcove behind a plastic screen that acted as a jury-rigged isolation system.

I was six, about to turn seven, all by myself behind a plastic screen and in pain.

I can remember the nursing staff were helpful and supportive and often made sure that I could get some of the food I wanted like bananas and Hawaiian Punch.

I was a kid, sometimes rambunctious about being trapped behind the screen, sometimes bored and often lonely.

Everyone who came through the plastic screen, doctors, nurses, orderlies and cleaning staff were wearing what today would be personal protective equipment, gowned and masked. That included my parents who, as much as I remember, who were very strange looking figures in the gowns, the masks and head covering.

It was several weeks before I was released from hospital. My infection can likely be described as “mild.”

Polio was in the community that year. On August 14, 1957,  after I was released from hospital the local paper the Northern Sentinel reported that a 24-year-old man, married with four small children, was paralyzed with polio. His name was only published because the community in 1957 was raising funds for the family, in the 1950s equivalent of today’s GoFundme campaigns, so it is difficult to know how many other cases there were due to medical confidentiality and justified fears of community reaction.

My parents, especially my father, later told me that I was never the same after I was released from hospital. Even if about 75 per cent of polio cases were asymptomatic with about 25 % with only mild symptoms, mild symptoms can change your life.

He said I had been a dynamic, robust and athletic child. After that I was awkward, uncoordinated, the kind of kid who was always picked last for a school team.

I would be hospitalized three times until I was 10 for what was likely a recurrence of the symptoms.

Decades later I was diagnosed with ADHD, which means that the polio likely made that problem worse when it came to coordination and becoming the awkward kid who could never catch or hit a ball.

The vaccines arrive

The polio rate in Canada began to fall soon after the introduction of the first vaccine. Canada began a mass vaccination campaign in April 1955, using homegrown production of the Salk vaccine from Connaught Laboratories in Toronto. In Canada, even before the introduction of our national health care, the vaccine was produced under government control and provided free across the country.

The local newspaper, the Northern Sentinel reported that polio vaccination for children began in the then small town in 1955, with this report on May 7, 1955, weeks after the vaccine was approved.

Looking back, I wonder if I somehow fell through the cracks. Our family moved from Vancouver to Kitimat in February 1957, so it may be that I missed the vaccination programs.

That was just as doctors were warning that polio was still a threat.

There was a mass vaccination of school children in 1958, and I definitely remember that I was vaccinated around that time.

In 1957, with a Canadian population of 16,610,000 with a rate of 1.12 per one thousand that meant there were about 18,600 cases in 1957, including me.

By 1959, rates were falling.

The chart form Health Canada shows the spike in polio infections dropped off to zero –ZERO — soon after the vaccination program began.

The second chart shows the effectiveness of the vaccines.  From peaks to zero.

Here are today’s Canadian polio vaccination guidelines 

Yet the pain lingers

As the New York Times has reported

“To some survivors, the idea of polio’s return is unfathomable.” (paywalled)

Many of those who survived still live with the consequences.

“People really underestimate how horrific polio was,” said Dr. Karen Kowalske, a physician and polio specialist at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Many who recovered now suffer “post-polio syndrome”: Some of the original symptoms, including muscle weakness and respiratory problems, return.

Dr. Kowalske tends to about 100 post-polio patients who need braces, wheelchairs or other devices to cope with progressive weakness. Some are older adults who became infected before the vaccine was available; others are middle-aged immigrants from countries where polio remained a problem for much longer than in the United States.

To some survivors, the idea of polio’s return is unfathomable.

Deny, deny, deny

I am angry. I will not mince words here. Despite all the advice about just talking to the vaccine hesitant, it appears that advice is useless as the lies, misinformation and disinformation are spread again and again on social media.  In the United States, the so-called MAHA Moms (Make America Healthy Again) campaigning against vaccination in the United States will make America and their own children sick. That anti vaccine sentiment is not only found in the US, of course, but in all countries where there are no memories of the toll of infectious disease.

Do those women who are vocally vaccine hesitant really want their children to be in an isolation ward, all alone, which in the 21st century would mean they are not only all alone, but they are hooked up to sensors and surrounded by monitoring equipment?

The necessary isolation during Covid could soon be repeated.

I have total contempt for anti-vaxxers who have never experienced a communicable disease. I rage and despair at the increasing number of people and politicians who deny the dangers of Covid, bird flu, season flu, RSV and emerging diseases, who ignore the resurgence of measles, whooping cough and possible polio.

Any anti-masker who shouts to the rooftops or posts on social media about their “freedom” has no respect for their fellow human beings. Politicians and activists who promote anti mask policies when masking is necessary to curb the spread of disease and also promote vaccine hesitancy or denial are ignorant, irresponsible and corrupt. They are motivated by ruthless ambition and self interest, religious dogmatism or ideologically blindness

Polio today

The virus affects the central nervous system in just one per cent of cases, with “symptoms of headache, neck, back, abdominal and extremity pain, fever, vomiting, stomach pain, lethargy, and irritability.”

One in a thousand cases results in paralytic polio. That was the fear of parents and kids in the 1950s and throughout history.

The World Health Organization says “Wild poliovirus cases have decreased by over 99% since 1988, from an estimated 350 000 cases in more than 125 endemic countries then, to just two endemic countries” which are Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On January 13 the New York Times reported  (paywalled)

Polio disables many fewer children now. Vaccination has scrubbed the virus from most of the planet, slashing the number of cases by more than 99.9 percent and preventing an estimated 20 million cases of paralysis.
Still, the virus has turned out to be a stubborn enemy, and eradication has been set back over and over again…
In 2024, 20 countries reported polio cases, and the virus was detected in wastewater in five European countries, decades after its official elimination from the region, and in Australia.
There are three types of polioviruses, and eradication requires that all three disappear. For years, the goal has been tantalizingly close.
Type 2 was declared vanquished in 2015, and Type 3 in 2019. Type 1 now circulates only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2021, the two countries together had just five cases; in 2024, they had 93.
But those figures tell only part of the story. In a surprising twist, an oral vaccine used in some parts of the world has kept poliovirus circulating long after it should have died out.

In most low- and middle-income countries, health officials still rely on an oral vaccine given as two drops on the tongue. It is inexpensive and easy to administer, and it prevents transmission of the virus.

But it contains weakened virus, which vaccinated children can shed into the environment through their feces. When there are enough unvaccinated children to infect, the pathogen slowly spreads, regaining its virulence and eventually causing paralysis.

 

There was an emergency vaccination campaign in the war-torn Gaza strip after a case of polio was identified which was likely caused by the oral vaccine. The vaccination program in Gaza appears to have been successful but it is hard to tell because Israel continues to bomb and attack hospitals and health care facilities, an act which has been a war crime since the Second World War.
The WHO warns as long as a single child remains infected, children in all countries are at risk of contracting polio. Failure to eradicate polio from these last remaining strongholds could result in a global resurgence of the disease.

Thanks to vaccination, the WHO says, More than 20 million people are able to walk today who would otherwise have been paralysed. An estimated 1.5 million childhood deaths have been prevented through the systematic administration of vitamin A during polio immunization activities.

Stopping vaccines

We are now faced with the terrifying prospect of activists who want to rescind approval for the polio vaccine as reported in the New York Times on December 13,  (paywalled.)

Aaron Siri is a lawyer who campaigns against all vaccines, who frequently appears in right wing media and podcasts. He  is a close ally of Robert Kennedy, Jr President Donald J. Trump’s choice for health secretary. In 2022m he filed a petition with the US Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.

That article is what prompted me to come out and tell the story of what happened to me. And note my polio was a mild case, there were thousands of others that were worse, with children ending up in iron lungs.

The problem is that the memory of the fear of polio is disappearing as the survivors age.

One point should be made about anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. He was born in 1954 at the height of the polio epidemic and just a few months before Jonas Salk announced the vaccine on April 12, 1955, with licencing and immunization campaigns in the United States and then around the world coming soon afterward.

That means Robert Kennedy Jr, a member of one of the most privileged families on Earth, was likely to have received the polio vaccine and the other childhood vaccinations at close to the head of the line. He was too young by just a couple of years to have any idea of the fear even the youngest kids felt at that time.

The right wing, the conspiracy theorists and anti vaxers are not only growing in the current environment but they are increasingly becoming more dangerous. The political and social media denial of the danger of Covid-19, continues despite with the latest figures which shows that Covid killed 7,079,582 people worldwide.

Bring Back Polio Again

Canadian politics have been disrupted (to put in mildly) since Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs and his continued statements about making Canada the 51st State.

The leader of the Opposition Conservative Party, Pierre Pollievre, appeared to be on the verge of an easy win in the upcoming federal election but he is now (so far) floundering to respond to Trump.

During the height of the Covid crisis, Pollievre was parroting the world wide conservative anti-vax lines, telling reporters in 2022 “I support all Canadians who peacefully stand up for their rights in protesting the Liberal Government’s vaccine vendetta,” Poilievre said in a statement to Global News

In introducing a private members bill also in 2022 the wannabe prime minister of Canada used his social media accounts and promoted the legislation as a way to “scrap all vaccine mandates and ban any and all future vaccine mandates” to give people their “medical freedom.”  The bill did not become law, but it reflects the attitude that selfish people have the right to infect others.

In the House of Commons, New Democrat Charlie Angus pointed out the truth about Pierre Pollievre as seen in this Youtube video.  In all his decades in Parliament he has introduced only one bill, his anti-vaccine bill. His colleague Peter Julian then told the House the policy of the Conservatives is “Bring Back Polio Again.”

So Canada also faces the same danger of hostility to science and medicine should the Conservatives become the government, which is less certain than it was just a week ago.

It is not Big Pharma

One of the stupidest arguments against vaccines is that it is all a profit seeking campaign by Big Pharma. Vaccination existed and saved lives long before the neoliberal obsession with corporate power that created Big Pharma.

Variolation against smallpox where a dried-out scab was used to produce a mild infection dates back to at least the mid sixteenth century and perhaps as far back as the eleventh century in China, India and Africa. Edward Jenner, an English surgeon,  first inoculated a boy with cowpox, the first vaccination, in 1796.

Smallpox was so deadly that the vaccination was quickly adopted around the world (while many leaders in all the world’s religions also advocated vaccination it was just as often that it was religion that was the lead in anti-vaccination movements).

Early warning system under attack

Even before the inauguration of Donald Trump, the world’s health care and warning system was already precarious. The emergence of Covid-19 created uncertainty, since the scientists and doctors were initially not sure what they were dealing with. That uncertainty did produce a backlash among conservatives, which has led in some cases to not only increased anti-vaccination movements but dismantling of public health procedures in the name of “freedom.”

Now, as of Feb. 5, the new Trump administration is quickly turning the entire planet’s health into chaos. Trump has signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the WHO which monitors diseases worldwide and warns against emerging threats.

Now the right-wing government of Argentina is also withdrawing from the WHO  after also gutting its healthcare system. But Covid measures were absolutely necessary not what President Javier Mile called Covid-19 pandemic the “caveman quarantine that involved … one of the most outlandish crimes against humanity in history”

While Trump and his Republican allies and suppliants gloat, the rest of the world is going to have to find a way to keep the planetary health surveillance system working by supporting the WHO and increasing their own surveillance and early warning systems.

There is chaos at the US Centers for Disease Control, where its early warning system was put on hold

As David Wallace Wells reported in the New York Times (paywalled)

Last Friday, at the end of a week in which a vaccine skeptic and sometime conspiracy theorist auditioned to lead the country’s nearly $2 trillion, 80,000-person public health apparatus, much of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website went dark — its weekly mortality reports, its data sets, certain guidance for clinicians and patients, all taken offline. C.D.C. researchers were ordered to retract a huge raft of their own, already-submitted research.

And Inside Medicine 

The policy goes beyond the previously reported pause of the CDC’s own publications, including Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), which has seen two issues go unreleased since January 16, marking the first publication gap of any kind in approximately 60 years. Emerging infectious Diseases and Preventing Chronic Disease, the CDC’s other major publications, also remain under lock and key, but have not yet been affected because they are monthly releases and both were released as scheduled in January, prior to President Trump’s inauguration. The policy also goes beyond the general communications gag order that already prevents any CDC scientist from submitting any new scientific findings to the public.

This is the blatant censorship of science for political and religious reasons not only in the United States but around the world.

A question that hasn’t been asked. If a US scientist was forced by a political hack to retract a valid peer-reviewed scientific or medical paper would any journal whether in the United States or around the world that values its credibility, accept that retraction? Or would that journal defy the censors and publish what could be a vital paper?

The  Trump administration blocked of one of the few good things George W. Bush did as president, PEPFAR,  a worldwide HIV AIDS prevention program can only be described as evil

Wallace Wells wrote

This is after the new administration had already suspended the country’s most successful global-health initiative, PEPFAR, which has saved millions of lives globally. The State Department later issued a PEPFAR waiver, but the program appears to have been rendered effectively inoperative by staff cuts; if the pause holds for even 90 days, it would result in over 135,000 additional children being born with H.I.V. The Famine Early Warning System Network was shut down, too.

What is likely the closing of the United States Agency for International Development will close dozens of programs that promote health around the world.

The AP reports that HIV/AIDS patients in Africa are already being denied care.

The funding turmoil is also closing health centres inside the United States .  Yet another reason that the rest of the world will be thankful for their universal single payer health care sytems and will resist any efforts, either by the United States or local conservatives.

Worldwide AP reports that the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development that 

The stop-work order has upended many of those projects and has seen nurses laid off and clinics closed in more than 25 countries where two-thirds of all child deaths occur globally, said Janeen Madan Keller, policy fellow and deputy director of global health policy at the Center for Global Development.

And the United States is supposed to be “pro-life”?

A coming plague

Make no mistake. There will be new plague. What the plague will be no one at this point knows.
History has shown that was it called  Zoonosis or zoonotic disease are likely to trigger a plague. Viruses, bacteria and parasites don’t care about politics.

Zoonotic diseases include measles, smallpox, influenza, HIV/AIDS, diphtheria, Ebola, mpox, the common cold, tuberculosis, West Nile, SARS, bubonic plague, salmonellosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, rabies, variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (vCJD, or mad cow disease in humans), Toxoplasmosis and tularemia. Many can spread from human to human while others can only infect vulnerable humans (for now).

As of this writing bird flu H5N1 is a likely source as the bird virus infects mammals and there have been a few human cases, but luckily, so far, no human-to-human transmission.

The links to the once definitive United States Centers for Disease Control are no longer reliable thanks to the Trump Administration. Here are links to the Province of British Columbia, Canadian Food Inspection Agency  and Britain’s National Health Service.

A new variant  of bird flu has been found in cattle in the US  increasing concern that the flu virus is becoming more adapted to mammals and could eventually infect humans.

There could be resurgence of a new Covid-19 variant, or something totally unexpected.

Plagues have disrupted human civilization for thousands of years. The United States cannot close its borders to a virus or bacteria or fungus. Almost always the disease whether viral or bacterial jumps from animal to human,

The Iliad begins with Apollo bringing a plague among the Greeks before Troy.

Lord Byron wrote a famous poem about a plague that stopped an Assyrian attack on ancient Israel.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

Plagues weakened ancient Rome and contributed to decline of its army and economy long before the Empire itself fell. There was the Antonine Plague 165 to 180 CE, which was likely the introduction of small pox to Europe and the Plague of Cyprian, 249 to 270. which may have been a resurgence of smallpox or perhaps the introduction of either measles or an Ebola like hemorrhagic fever,

Bubonic plague, which now can be cured by antibiotics (for now) has occurred again and again throughout history with Yersinia pestis traced back to the Bronze Age, if not earlier.

Plagues are not ancient history. There was the 1918 flu epidemic.

In the 1980s, It was the CDC that first warned the world about HIV/AIDS. The conservative governments of the 1980s for reasons of homophobia and racism did close to nothing, or the bare minimum facilitated the spread of the virus until the danger became so obvious those government had to act.

According to the WHO , since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, 88.4 million [71.3–112.8 million] people have been infected with the HIV virus and about 42.3 million [35.7–51.1 million] people have died of HIV.

Thanks to Donald Trump and his decrees that HIV death toll will begin to climb again.

Let me close this essay with a photo that is a stark warning. The 1862 Smallpox epidemic on the west coast of North America, which is explained in detail in this University of Victoria website and this Wikipedia article

The smallpox spread quickly among the Indigenous people of the northwest, from the Puget Sound to Sitka, Alaska, with a mortality rate of between 60 per cent and 90 per cent.
One cause of the mortality was that the Indigenous people around Victoria were forced to flee by white settlers or fled voluntarily while the disease was still incubating.
Only a tiny fraction were vaccinated and there was no earlier smallpox pandemic so no historic immunity.  The trauma of that population crash lingers today as Indigenous  nations recover from two centuries of oppression and racism.

Atlhough the science was known by the 1860s, corrupt missionaries used the pandemic to preach that indigenous customs were the work of the devil and that the disease of punishment for sins and that they should “come to Jesus” (without being vaccinated), something religions have been doing for centuries.  No mention of course that some white settlers were also dying of smallpox and they were not pagans.

During the HIV/AIDS pandemic 120 years later, Christians again repeated the lie that a disease was their God’s punishment. During Covid it was again conservative Christians who preached against pandemic prevention protocols like vaccines, masks and restrictions such as lockdowns.

On Haida Gwaii, the population of one of the great civilizations of the Americas, crashed by an estimated 72 per cent with some areas as high as 90 per cent. Ten Haida villages were abandoned and the ruins can be seen today in Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site.

That is what we all face if the stupidity continues.