I woke up this morning thinking about polio(myelitis) and spent my first cup of coffee poking around the internet about it. If you’re around my age (which isn’t yet old enough to sacrifice myself for the good of the young, as some of you seem to think), you’ll remember getting your polio vaccine(s) as a child—via a shot in the arm and/or sugar cubes soaked in drops of the virus. The sugar cube was clearly more enjoyable. The shot left a unique scar—one I still have as you can see in the light square in the picture to the right.
There were plenty of people who, as today, either dismissed the polio virus, blamed it on some group of people somewhere, or were convinced because of some combination of ignorance and a narcissistic confidence that the God of their own faith tradition would place an invisible shield around them. I am also sure there were many willing to try anything to protect their children, who—unlike the COVID-19 virus, thankfully—seemed to be most vulnerable to polio.
What made me go looking are the increasing groans from some that it could be as much as 18 months before a vaccine for COVID-19 is created and tested. And the indignation of those inclined to dismiss the danger of a novel virus and demand that we go back to “normal” immediately, bringing their handguns and AR-15s to legislative buildings like the mobs they are. As if we could return to a time when over 70,000 (and rising) of us in the U.S. alone were alive.
I get it. We humans feel best when we have a sense of control, of power over the negative consequences of things we encounter—large or small. It’s why people—ignorant by virtue of a lack of access or understanding of the advances of science—reach for their holy books in search of cut-and-dried rules or follow equally ignorant leaders in their pulpits or governments.
I use the term “ignorant” here, not as an epithet as it is too often used in our political discourse, but as it was basically and originally defined: lacking knowledge, information, or awareness about a particular thing. We are ALL ignorant about thousands of things. I know a fair amount about a few things—psychological testing and statistics, programming and computer software, book editing and publishing—but I am ignorant when it comes to everything from the laws of thermodynamics to how to identify which snakes are poisonous to how the engine of my 2015 Hyundai Elantra works, much less how to fix it. I am eternally grateful that I live in an age where, for virtually everything that touches me that I know nothing about, there are people who do—and that, for the most part, I can tell who they are and who they aren’t. I am a walking example of the old adage: “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know.”
I do know this: It was scientific research—most notably that of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, who developed the shot and the sugar cube vaccines, respectively—that ultimately tamed the polio virus. And it will be scientific research that will tame this one and the host of other novel viruses that may erupt in the future. But these days, it will take up to 18 months, not six decades. (The first recorded polio epidemic in the U.S. was in 1894.)
We must listen to our experts in public health, infectious diseases, and epidemiology. They are telling us how to begin to take control, not only to curb and reduce the sickness and death, but to speed up our ability to safely reopen our businesses and put people back to work.
Although I am a “high risk” person for COVID-19, over the age of 60 and diabetic for starters, I am not unconcerned about the economic fallout of extended “shelter at home” ordinances. In the recent Great Recession, I lost, as did many, the financial security of a lifetime of work that I will not likely recover. But we cannot protect the majority of those who are vulnerable and return to any level of normalcy until every municipality, every county, rural or urban, Democratic or Republican, can test everyone. Neither random sampling nor testing only those with symptoms, although better than nothing, won’t do the job with any speed or efficiency.
If we can mobilize businesses to create ventilators and masks, we can mobilize laboratories across the nation to create test kits for “Do you have it?” and “Are you now immune?” and PPE for health professionals to administer them. We can use the census data from 2010, notwithstanding the current census in process, to know exactly how many test kits to send where. Databases exist to store everything from what you just ordered on the internet to the details of your last tax return. And we have airlines, delivery services, trucking firms and the U.S. Post Office, that could mobilize to get them to the ends of the earth. The ship of “containment” has sailed, but the ship of protecting as many as possible—both workers and customers, who are the only true drivers of the economy—hasn’t.
I am chagrined that in the United States of America, which produced the scientists who stopped polio in its tracks—scientists who were, by the way, both of Hebrew ethnicity, one the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, the other an immigrant himself—has apparently disintegrated into a ship of fools, pitied by friends who once looked to us for leadership, and led by—at the very least—an ignorant man who, like the emotional infant he is, craves and demands praise for cleaning up the very messes he has made while blaming them on everyone but himself.
And yet, amazingly, I am still hopeful. Most of us will survive and a new morning will come—because thinking people who know what they know and know what they don’t know will continue to do what they have to do to move through and on. I may be among those who survive. I may not. But no matter what, until the new Salks and Sabins appear, I will practice the three “W”s. I will wear my masks, I will wait six feet away to peruse the meat counter in the grocery store until the person already there is done, and I will wash my hands.
And, if you can’t do the same while waiting for 18 months to see something our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents waited six decades for, all I can say besides, “Please stay away from me,” is “Bless your heart.”
Prodigal Prophet 