I had polio when I was two years old in 1954. I have no memory of the experience, but I recall that my late mother would cry whenever the subject of polio came up.
Thankfully, I was not placed in an “Iron Lung” like so many other victims of polio, but I wore heavy leg braces, the kind of awful contraptions Forrest Gump wore in the film (see the below photo of a young girl in the braces).
Thankfully, once again, the polio vaccine cured me.
Then, like now, there are doubters about the effectiveness of a vaccine.
So as we approach the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine, one should look back at Dr. Salk’s polio vaccine.
Claire Barrett at Historynet.com offers a piece on how Elvis Presley helped promote the polio vaccine by taking it on live TV on The Ed Sullivan Show.
You can read the piece via the below link:
How Elvis Presley Helped to Popularize the Polio Vaccine (historynet.com)
You can also read an earlier post on the polio pandemic via the below link:
Paul Davis On Crime: A Look Back At Polio: The Disease That Paralyzed America And How We Defeated It
