Consider world without vaccines

By Robert Strauss

My mom didn't seem like a sentimentalist to me, but when she died, I found a small black record book that she used as a journal for my first seven or eight years. I keep it in my desk drawer, so now and again I page through it.

I took it out earlier this month and turned to the longest entry - maybe three handwritten pages of 20. Here is what she wrote:

"On April 26, 1958, took sick & ran fever. Had doctor and he felt could be start of Measles. Broke out with measles April 30. Seemed pretty good until the evening when he fell out of bed and got two nasty bumps on the head. Went into a convulsion and temperature shot up to 105 degrees. Doctor came immediately and we all worked over him. Erma & Al stopped by and helped. It is now 1 a.m. and Sam & I will stay up all night to check fever. Think it has broken now as he is perspiring but can't be sure. This has been a night of nights as he looked [like] we were going to lose him, but I guess God is going to let us keep him here on earth. Amen."

It's not hard to know what I think about vaccine-denying. Part of it is that measles seemed extinct and people were unaware that it can be quickly fatal.

Another page in the book has Mom's handwritten "Record of Immunization Dates":

"April 10, 1956 - first polio shot

"May 10, 1956 - first chicken pox

"June 13, 1956 - 2nd polio shot

"Sept. 17, 1956 - 5-year-old booster shot

"Feb. 23, 1957 - 3rd polio shot."

After reading that, my thoughts went back to the bus I took to kindergarten and first grade, the one where every day we picked up Marsha Speakman in front of her house.

Those shots and boosters were too late for Marsha. I still hear the clanking of her metal leg braces as she awkwardly and slowly clambered up the steps of the bus. Marsha caught polio, apparently just a little too early for Salk's vaccine.

I also remember the lines of people a few years later curling around the basketball courts and parking lots at Horace Mann Elementary in Cherry Hill, as the whole community stood waiting for their opportunity to get the oral Sabin polio vaccine, which maybe the government didn't require but certainly provided for all of us.

I wasn't done with boosters and the like. I had a spate of ear infections that doctors determined were allergic reactions, so for several years, I took two allergy shots a week. I didn't die or catch something else, just stoically went to Dr. Boguslaw's office and had him or a nurse jab me.

I write not to make sport of Chris Christie's or Rand Paul's equivocation over the issue, but to remind folks that there was a time not long ago when vaccination was not looked upon as the plague, but among the most important things science gave us.

The measles shot wasn't early enough for me, but I was also lucky to be middle-class in an era when doctors showed up at your house to save your life. I don't know what became of Marsha, but hopefully she didn't spend her life thinking, "If only Dr. Salk had been on his vaccine a few years earlier."

I know some parents have concerns, but I'm betting there are more who either had journal entries like my mom's or could have. And I am also betting that many were not nearly as lucky as me.