Polio came for 5-year-old Lynn Lane when she was visiting her grandmother in rural Indiana. Suddenly, her arms and legs became weak, and by the time she got to a hospital in Indianapolis, she was totally paralyzed and in respiratory failure. Lane spent the next several months in an iron lung.
“I don’t really remember too much about that,” Lane, now 73, told me Monday from her home north of Sacramento. “The only memories I really have are mainly at night. You could hear the swooshing of all the iron lungs.”
Lane’s family moved to Northern California a few years after her bout with polio, when she was 8. “That’s when I started noticing I was different than other kids,” she said. “I was in leg braces and had to learn to walk all over again.”
Her parents took her to Shriners Hospital in San Francisco, where she lived on and off for the next eight years.
“It was kind of like a boarding school, except with surgeries,” Lane said. “They did all these muscle and tendon transfers. I think I had maybe 15 to 18 surgeries. They transferred my quads from the front to the back so I could stand.”
In her early 40s, Lane was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, which afflicts between 25% and 40% of childhood polio survivors. It is similar to chronic fatigue syndrome and can range from mild to debilitating.
“I’m not in a wheelchair yet,” said Lane, who uses leg braces and crutches, “but it’s heading that way.”
The idea that anyone would question the polio vaccine now, she said, “makes me nuts.”
Last week, the New York Times reported that in 2022, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attorney and close advisor Aaron Siri had petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the polio vaccine in use for the last three decades until its safety can be studied further against an unvaccinated control group. Kennedy, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, is a longtime vaccine skeptic who spouts nonsense about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and a lot of other things. He is, in the view of many medical professionals, a danger to public health.
The Times’ report set off shock waves. Before Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine in the mid-1950s, the disease killed or paralyzed more than half a million people around the world each year. Many high-profile Americans who suffered from childhood polio, including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and the actor Mia Farrow, immediately condemned the questioning of the vaccine. Kennedy and Trump were forced to reassure Americans that they support the lifesaving treatment.
As Kennedy met with Republican senators to shore up support for his nomination this week, he told reporters that he is “all for” the polio vaccine. Trump, in his first post-election press conference, insisted, “You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. It’s not going to happen.”
And yet Trump also persisted in promulgating the oft-debunked lie that childhood vaccines are linked to autism, vowing to “look into” the conspiracy theory. Kennedy, he said, will “come back with a report as to what he thinks. We’re going to find out a lot.”
This fear-mongering is unconscionable. We already know a lot. In fact, we know more than a lot.
The autism question has “been studied to death in some ways,” said Richard Pan, a pediatrician and former California state senator who led the successful 2015 campaign to eliminate a “personal belief” exemption from vaccine requirements for the state’s schoolchildren.
“Do we know what causes autism? Not yet,” Pan said. But, he added, we do know what does not cause autism: the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which was implicated in a long-since-discredited 1998 paper based on 12 cases by the defrocked English physician Andrew Wakefield.
“What will it take to convince Trump and RFK Jr. that a retracted 12-subject study with fake data was actually wrong?” asked Pan.
In any case, he added, blaming the vaccine is an “ableist” response to autism by some parents. “They don’t want to accept that their child is neurodivergent,” Pan said. “You want to say your child is broken and my life has been ruined and it’s the fault of Big Pharma or whoever.”
People who do not vaccinate their children, he said, are risking the health of the very people they are supposed to protect.
“You are playing with your children’s lives,” he said. “All of these adults have already been vaccinated.”
Although polio has essentially been eradicated in the U.S., it still exists in parts of the world and could certainly make a comeback here if enough people refuse to vaccinate their children. In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that an unvaccinated New York man had contracted polio. And earlier this year, amid Israel’s war on Hamas, a 10-month-old child in Gaza contracted the virus, confirming fears about the war’s potential effect on preventable childhood disease.
As for the Kennedy advisor’s petition, Pan said, how could we withhold a potentially lifesaving treatment from children in a control group to test the efficacy of a vaccine that has been used successfully for decades?
“Sometimes a trial cannot be done safely or ethically, “ he said. “Are you willing to volunteer your child into the control group?”
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian