Dave Helling’s father was profoundly conservative, but he made sure his family was protected from polio. Something has changed. | Opinion
www.yahoo.com
So let’s think about this: The nation saw about 58,000 polio cases in 1952, the worst year for the disease in American history. Around 21,000 people were paralyzed, some permanently. There were 3,145 deaths.
So far,
615,000 people have died from COVID-19.
It’s astonishing that the U.S. conducted a mass vaccination program for a disease that killed two or three thousand patients a year, yet struggles to get enough people to take shots for a disease that killed 21,000 people in one week.
It’s true that polio largely infected children, while COVID attacked mostly adults and the elderly. But the onslaught of this coronavirus hasn’t spared the young: As of this month,
4.3 million children have caught COVID-19, roughly 14% of all cases.
Kansas reports 43,000 kids have been infected with COVID;
Missouri, 66,000.
More children are being hospitalized with COVID now; the delta variant seems to be more harmful to kids. As of now, children younger than 12 can’t get a vaccine, which could make things worse.
==============
What was the development time for the polio vaccine?
His vaccine, however, being a live attenuated virus taken orally, was still in the research stage and would not be ready for use until five years after Jonas Salk's polio vaccine (a dead-virus injectable vaccine) had reached the market.
Yet everyone at the time got vaccinated. No one's head popped off later on.
