Two-year-olds in the early 1950s were given vaccines by glass syringe for the bacterial diseases diphtheria, tetanus (commonly, lockjaw), pertussis (whooping cough), and for the viral disease smallpox. There were no other vaccines available.

Parents in the early 1950s gave their children dimes destined for the March of Dimes drive to develop a polio vaccine. Generations of parents worried and waited anxiously for the summers—the time of highest infection rate—to pass. The peak of the polio epidemic in the U.S. lasted from 1916-1955, with the highest mortality rate in 1952. For the Great Depression-World War II generations, President Franklin Roosevelt, in office from 1933 to his death in 1945, was a living reminder of the permanent paralysis left by polio (although it is postulated now that he actually suffered from a severe form of Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease of the nerves with polio-like symptoms, for which there was no cure during his lifetime).

Finally, in 1955, Jonas Salk’s vaccine, one made from killed virus, was approved. Americans were vaccinated, but some of the children afflicted during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s are still living now with the effects of polio.

As the march to eradicate polio proceeded (succeeding in this country only in 1979), children of my generation were still susceptible to a succession of the viral diseases for which there were no vaccines: measles, rubella, mumps, and chickenpox. Penicillin became widely available near the end of WWII, and so bacterial diseases pandemic through the early 20th century such as scarlet fever dropped in prevalence and mortality.

Unless my blood was drawn today to detect and measure the level of the antibodies I produced against these viruses, I can’t be sure that I experienced all of them. One exception is chickenpox, which reappeared as shingles at age fifty. However, I’m fairly certain that I was sick with measles and/or rubella (so-called German measles), mumps for sure—unforgettable because it was so weird—and as noted, chickenpox. 

More than one caused fevers so high that I hallucinated. Vases rose up and down in the air, my mother’s head became the size of an orange (she didn’t seem to notice). Describing these imaginary events alarmed the adults in the room, but the hallucinations were the one interesting thing about enduring illnesses that brought excruciating rashes and painfully swollen glands; days as miserable as they were long. 

Luckily, all of the illnesses passed, leaving me an energetic little kid again, but they often started the same way, too. Waking with a painfully parched throat, I’d ask my father, who always rose very early, “Daddy, could I have a glass of water?” He brought the glass of cool water to me and both the act and the water brought some comfort.

That childhood memory brings home how awful it is to have a viral illness and to be alone, as so many around the world are now. So many sick enough with Covid-19 to be hospitalized, sick enough that their families can’t be near them, sick enough to be unable to swallow water. A high number are sick enough to die alone, or with strangers, however caring the nurses and doctors, inadequately protected and succumbing to the disease themselves.

Waves of Covid-19 will continue to wreck lives for some time, until the vaccine and treatment are available, until immunity is established. Covid-19 has ripped off the slipping mask underneath which lies our country’s inequality. Health care access, access to jobs able to provide homes, food, education, safety and security: there are the very rich and the rest of us fall into some level of relative poverty and dependence on a Swiss cheese social net.

The Covid-19 viral outbreak has knocked many Americans off their perches, ones they may never recover. We all hope that many, many lessons will be learned from this pandemic, which caught the U.S. absolutely flat-footed; we always hope in a crisis.

I was lucky to have vaccines available at age two, penicillin to treat scarlet fever, the polio vaccine a few years later, and relevant vaccines available later in life. In those years, talented researchers and a supportive government insisted upon vaccine and drug development. In recent years though, an anti-science surge has become seriously embedded in our culture, especially with supporters and members of the current administration, allowing a pandemic the time to pull us fully into its maw.

There are people in this country who believe that vaccines are harmful, who insist on causal relationships between vaccines and certain medical conditions, no matter how many studies prove otherwise. They ignore the fact that Americans suffer little or not at all from measles, rubella or mumps—serious illnesses in many children and most adults—thanks to vaccines.

The lessons of the earlier centuries are unknown to the anti-science crowd, the anti-vaccinators, even as we all live through a very hard lesson now. 

Be well, dear reader.