Political Quotes

“I wish to close with a personal story about polio. My brother, born in 1947--there are three of us, three boys. My brother is the oldest, my brother Bob. When he was in about the first, second, or maybe the third grade, my father, who was a local family physician in Mansfield, was asked by--if not the CDC, some national health organization to give polio vaccines in Mansfield, OH. There were doctors in other communities who were asked to do that. They chose my father in part because he was a good doctor. They also chose him because he had son, he had a child who was in second or third or fourth grade at the time. People were afraid. They weren't sure about injecting that vaccine into their arm because a lot of families thought that actually could cause polio. There was always that fear. Scientists didn't believe that, but an awful lot of people did. There was a picture on the front page of the Mansfield News Journal in the 1950s of my brother getting a polio vaccine. I believe his was Salk. Sabin came later with the cube. He got the Salk vaccine, administered by my dad. CDC or one of the other public health groups--I apologize, I don't know which--made sure that happened all over the country so people could be more reassured. That was really the beginning, with Salk and then Sabin, of the eradication of polio in this country.…”