Polio Ravaged My Family. Forget Its Horror at Your Peril.

One day when my mom was eleven years old, she found a photo in the attic of two small children who bore a resemblance to her and her brother. She brought the photo downstairs to her mother and asked who they were.

“Those are your two brothers,” she said. “They died of polio.”

On October 21, 1945, two and a half years before my mom was born, her brother—my uncle, Ronald Winard—died of polio at the age of three. Four days later, his older brother, Howard, died at the age of seven.

“Are they in heaven?” my mother remembers asking. She never forgot the answer that came back: “No, they are in the ground.”

With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nominated to be Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, his long history of anti-vaccine activism is a significant worry of his critics. Kennedy is perhaps best known for promoting the debunked theory that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism. But he has also criticized the polio vaccine, which all 50 states require, even though it essentially eradicated the disease in the U.S.

The polio vaccine, Kennedy said in an interview last year, has “killed many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” His view is that the vaccine was effective against polio, but the side effects caused by the vaccine—specifically, a virus that contaminated some batches from 1955 to 1963, known as SV40—caused an explosion in soft-tissue cancer, a theory that has not been proven by science. National and global health agencies have found the polio vaccine to be safe and effective.

But that hasn’t stopped the spread of vaccine skepticism. Last week, The New York Times published an article about how a close Kennedy associate, Aaron Siri—who Kennedy is interested in bringing into HHS as general counsel—has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.

For my family, the prospect of halting polio immunization—or even convincing the public that the lifesaving vaccine is unsafe—is horrifying.

Unlike the Covid-19 virus, polio attacks children—especially small children. Until Jonas Salk invented the first polio vaccine in 1953, for much of the first half of the twentieth century, there were periodic polio epidemics, with an especially alarming period in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The year my uncles died, there were over 13,000 cases of polio in the U.S. and over 1,000 deaths.

Marcia Rosenthal, my mom’s cousin, was eleven in 1945. She lived in Newark, New Jersey, a few blocks away from my grandparents and their sons. Summer seemed to be the peak period for the virus, so every summer in her childhood, she told me, her parents forbade her from mingling in big crowds, going to the movies, or going to the public pool in her neighborhood. She had a friend who wasn’t even allowed to leave the house at all in the summer. Parents spent their days in fear of their children getting polio.

That nightmare became reality for my grandparents one Sunday in October of that year. Ronald and Howard went to their cousin Marcia’s house in Newark, and then went to play in the park. Marcia, who is now 90 years old, told me it felt like there was relief in the air because the “summer scare” had passed. But two days later, the boys took sick with symptoms of polio: muscle weakness, nausea and vomiting, and stiffness in their spines and necks.

Marcia’s mother ripped apart the house, throwing out drapes and chairs and anything the boys may have touched. In all likelihood, they had been exposed to polio not at the park, but at Ronald’s nursery school. We know this because another cousin enrolled there also contracted polio and had to be put in an iron lung to breathe. The cousin survived, though he has had ongoing physical effects, including facial nerve paralysis and muscle weakness.

My uncles died within a week, but not before suffering. Details of exactly what the boys endured at Newark Beth Israel Hospital died with my grandparents. Polio kills children when their nerves are destroyed, when their muscles shut down, when they can no longer swallow, and then can no longer breathe.

My grandparents never spoke about their sons, even after my mom learned what had happened. But for my mom, the revelation was illuminating. She had spent her childhood aware of a darkness in her home that she couldn’t understand—with a mother who, when she wasn’t anxious, was dipping into deep depressions. Now my own mother understood why.

My grandmother had been pregnant with her third child when her sons died. When she delivered my uncle just a month later, she was so traumatized that she was unable to hold or care for her new baby.

Meanwhile, the polio epidemics continued. In 1952, when my mom was four, there were some 58,000 cases of the disease and over 3,000 deaths. That was the peak year for polio in the U.S.

Marcia told me that the autumn my uncles died, she decided, at age 11, that she wasn’t going to have any children. She didn’t think she could live through every single summer racked with the worry she saw in her parents—and the despair that came for her cousins’ family.

When she got married in 1954, she told me she was too frightened to consider getting pregnant. But by the following year, Salk’s vaccine was widely available to the public. Mothers across the country raced to have their children get the jab. Marcia said the vaccine felt like a miracle.

While it was too late for my uncles and for thousands of other children, Marcia’s three daughters grew up in an America where they didn’t have to fear polio. So did I. Thanks to the vaccine, there has not been a single indigenously acquired case of polio in the United States since 1979. Polio is now endemic in only two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where vaccine penetration is difficult.

When my grandfather died in 1998, my mom found among his belongings paperwork for the upkeep of Ronald and Howard’s graves at a Newark cemetery. She discovered that for fifty years, my grandfather had visited their graves every single week. He had never told anyone. In my family there were some things that were just too painful to discuss.