Beyond the moment their baby is immunized against the disease, the majority of American families rarely consider the issue of influenza. However, there was a time when influenza permanently paralyzed over 20 000 individuals, killing many of them.
The disease was turned on by vaccinations. Over the past decade, there has been only one case in the United States, related to global go.
If smallpox vaccination rates dropped or the vaccine were to become less affordable, that may change very quickly.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a seasoned vaccine critic who might be the secretary of health and individual companies, has argued that the notion that vaccination has nearly eradicated influenza is” a myth.”
And while Kennedy has stated that he won’t be removing vaccinations from Americans, he has long argued that they are insufficiently safe and effective.
As late as 2023, he said volumes of an earlier version of the polio vaccination, contaminated with a virus, caused malignancies” that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio previously did”. Although the contamination was real, no evidence of a link between cancer or study was provided.
A client contacted Aaron Siri, a lawyer and advisor to Kennedy, to ask the court for the rejection of the submission of some influenza vaccines because they might be illegal.
Those attempts appear unlikely to succeed. And there is widespread support for immunization among notable Republicans, including President-elect Donald Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child.
However, less clear methods are permitted by the secretary of health and human service. He or she could retreat federal funding for child immunization programs, prompt the end of state mandates for vaccines in states currently disenchanted, or foster doubts about the shots, thereby accelerating a decrease in immunization rates.
According to experts, if influenza vaccination rates were to decline, the virus might spread to areas of the nation where significant numbers of people are unvaccinated, wreaking devastation once more. The disease may be almost completely gone in its initial form, but resurgence continues to pose a threat.
According to Dr. David Heymann, an infectious disease doctor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and former World Health Organization chief of smallpox eradication, any decision the Trump administration makes regarding the smallpox vaccine is likely to have a global impact.
” If the U. S. takes away the passport, then some other places will do the same thing”, he said. To have influenza resurge when it is so near to destruction “would remain very, very, very, very sad”.
Before 1955, when the vaccination was introduced, smallpox disabled more than 15, 000 Americans each year and hundreds of thousands more widespread. In 1952 only, it killed 3, 000 Americans after numbness left them unable to breathe.
Many of those who survived also live with the consequences.
Dr. Karen Kowalske, a doctor and influenza specialist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said,” People actually underestimate how tragic influenza was.”
Some who recovered now suffer “post-polio disorder”: Some of the original signs, including muscle weakness and breathing problems, profit.
Kowalske tends to about 100 post-polio people who need brackets, chairs or other tools to cope with liberal failure. Some are middle-aged refugees from nations where polio was a concern for substantially longer than in the United States, while others are older people who became infected before the vaccination was available.
To some victims, the idea of polio’s profit is unimaginable.
Carol Paulk was only three years old when she first learned of the illness. Her straight leg never recovered, and she has endured severe pain and a sharp limp for the rest of her life.
Paulk is one of the luckier people. Until recently, she did not suffer the breathe, swallowing or intestinal problems that frequently torment polio victims.
She has had” a wonderful, beautiful living” with a partner and three sons, a law degree and broad traveling abroad.
But she is constantly, outside, weighing how far away the next seat is, how much her energy will last, and whether a particular activity is worthwhile in the form of crippling pain the following day.
She didn’t participate in the 1963 March on Washington or play sports, as she desperately wanted to, or go walking, skiing and bicycling with her husband.
I would go to a public hearing about the polio vaccine, remove my brace, and ask people if they want to see my leg. Is that what they want for their kids? she said.
Today, fewer children are able to use polio. Vaccination has eradicated the virus from most of the planet, reducing the number of cases by more than 99.9 % and preventing an estimated 20 million paralysis cases.
The virus has nevertheless proven to be a valiant adversary, and eradication has been delayed repeatedly.
In 2024, 20 countries reported polio cases, and the virus was detected in wastewater in five European countries, decades after its official elimination from the region, and in Australia.
” Any reduction in coverage rates increases the risk of polio anywhere”, said Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization’s polio eradication program.
There are three types of polioviruses, and eradication requires that all three disappear. For years, the goal has been tantalizingly close.
Type 2 was declared vanquished in 2015, and Type 3 in 2019. Type 1 is currently only present in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2021, the two countries together had just five cases, in 2024, they had 93.
However, those figures only provide a portion of the narrative. In a surprising twist, poliovirus continued to circulate long after it should have stopped being fatal in some parts of the world.
In most low- and middle-income countries, health officials still rely on an oral vaccine given as two drops on the tongue. It is inexpensive and easy to administer, and it prevents transmission of the virus.
However, it contains weakened virus that vaccine-educated children can euthanize through their feces. When enough unvaccinated children are present to infect, the pathogen gradually spreads, recovering its virulence, and eventually leading to paralysis.
The issue is this: Since 2016, the oral vaccine used for routine immunization has not been effective against Type 2 virus. On the grounds that Type 2 virus, which is naturally present in the body, had vanished, global health authorities made the deliberate decision to reformulate the vaccine.
That turned out to be premature. In some places around the world, more Type 2 virus had been emitted by orally vaccinated children than officials had anticipated. When some nonimmunized children, or those given the newer oral vaccine, encountered this “vaccine-derived” Type 2 virus, they became infected and paralyzed.
More children are now paralyzed by vaccine-derived poliovirus than a naturally occurring virus does. For example, Nigeria eliminated all so-called wild-type polio in 2020. But in 2024, the country saw 93 cases of Type 2 vaccine-derived virus, more than one-third the global total.
As long as they are vaccinated, none of this is a problem for Americans.
All three polio types are protected by the inactivated polio vaccine ( IPV ) used for routine immunization of American children. Because these formulations contain dead viruses, they cannot spread disease or turn dangerous.
However, they do not completely stop the virus from getting infected or transmitting, like some other infectious disease vaccines. This aspect is among the criticisms of Siri, Kennedy’s adviser.
Still, it is less important than the vaccines ‘ near-perfect power to prevent paralysis, experts said.
” Yeah, yeah, it’s true, IPV doesn’t prevent transmission”, said Dr. William Petri, an infectious diseases physician and past president of the WHO’s polio research committee. ” But, boy, that’s the best thing since sliced bread at preventing paralysis”.
It does mean, however, that people vaccinated with IPV can keep the virus circulating, even when they themselves are protected against illness and paralysis.
Here’s a plausible scenario that worries researchers: Someone who received the oral polio vaccine in another country might enter the country and then lose the virus in its weak form. This has already happened in other countries.
So long as most of the population remains vaccinated, this is not likely to set off an epidemic. However, if the virus enters neighborhoods with low vaccination rates, it may spread, and it may eventually revert to a virulent state that can lead to paralysis.
In New York in 2022, polio struck a 20-year-old unvaccinated member of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Rockland County.
Compared to the national average of 93 %, the vaccination rate in that county was just over 60 %.
The young man’s paralysis was caused by a virus that had been circulating for months, and it was later discovered in the sewage of several New York counties. In response, the state declared an emergency after vaccination rates amounted to 60 %.
Genetically related polioviruses were detected in wastewater samples in Britain, Israel and Canada, suggesting widespread transmission. Authorities later found two distinct vaccine-derived Type 2 polioviruses in New York wastewater, suggesting two separate importations.
In the United States, polio is unlikely to be as horrifying as it was in the days before vaccines. Many older people still recall that they were forbidden to swim in rivers, pools, or any other place where the virus might be as children.
” The reason we weren’t allowed to play in rivers in the’ 50s is because raw sewage was dumped into the rivers”, Heymann said.
That is no longer the case, so there “wouldn’t be massive transmission immediately in the U. S.”, he added.
But even if just a few children were to become paralyzed, “it would be awful”.
