Polio has no cure. The vaccine is the only way to save lives. | Opinion

Polio starts out just like the flu. You may feel a little achy, a little feverish. Maybe you stay home for a few days, watch TV and slurp broth. If you’re unlucky, your flu might last a little longer than you expect.

And one day, when you try to stand up, you can’t. Move, you might tell your legs, but they don’t. They are frozen. You are frozen.

This is poliomyelitis, a disease that mostly – though not exclusively – strikes children and leads, in 1 in 200 infections, to irreversible paralysis after the virus attacks the brain and spinal cord.

Earlier this year, the chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opined that polio vaccines should be optional – in order, he said, to restore trust in public health. The announcement was buried by the news cycle.

Maybe this doesn’t sound so crazy to you. After all, it’s not like he suggested that we get rid of vaccines. Maybe you like the idea of making your own decisions about your children.

But making this vaccine optional is a bad idea. It’s also a dangerous one.

Making polio vaccine optional would undo generations of progress

I am an infectious disease doctor, but don’t just take my word for it. Ask older friends or relatives. Ask former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

They’ll remember when a culture of deep fear punctured the comfortable, post-war life in the United States. When summer was polio season. When kids couldn’t go to swimming pools, parks, county fairs or playdates because of the fear of this virus.

At its peak in 1952 in the United States, 20,000 became paralyzed due to polio in a single year. Others lost the use of muscles that allowed them to breathe, forcing them to live in iron lungs, medieval precursors to ventilators that enclosed the entire body in a metal tube, leaving just the head sticking out.

Thousands of children died.

There is still no cure for polio, but there is a way to prevent this terrible illness.

Jonas Salk's discovery changed everything

This month, we are marking 71 years free from the fears that older generations remember so well. Thanks to the discovery of the polio vaccine, announced on April 12, 1955, polio cases dropped from more than 50,000 to fewer than 200 in just six years.

Thirty years later, when Ronald Reagan celebrated the American credited with the discovery, Jonas Salk, the president presciently observed that younger Americans could not appreciate the magnitude of Salk’s feat.

Today, the World Health Organization estimates that more than 20 million people can walk who would have otherwise been paralyzed by poliomyelitis, and that 1.5 million children are alive who would have otherwise died. The vaccine has been an uncontroversial public health triumph.

Polio remains only in the global regions where vaccine rates are low. The United States should take heed.

If the polio vaccine becomes optional here, some families would undoubtedly opt not to vaccinate their children. It then becomes a mathematical certainty that we will see a resurgence of polio, similar to the recent resurgence of measles, with deadly consequences.

Vaccine hesitancy is more dangerous than vaccines

You may believe your choice doesn’t affect others, but there is no way to know who in a community is unvaccinated, whose immune system is shoddy, or who is particularly vulnerable.

We understand this argument when it comes to drunk driving. Individuals have the right to drink alcohol but not to endanger others – not even when it seems like there is no one else on the road.

The ACIP chair’s comment might have just been a stray remark. So far, the committee has not moved to officially change its polio vaccination recommendation.

But inviting skepticism about a safe, lifesaving intervention hardly helps to keep our children safe – or to restore trust in science.

As Reagan predicted, we have forgotten Salk’s feat. We’ve transferred our fears from the infections that plagued us to the vaccines that saved us.

Making the polio vaccine optional will only beget new fears. It will usher in the return of polio season, of leg braces, ventilators, thwarted childhoods and lost lives. It will not restore trust.

Here’s what I tell my friends and family, even when I’m not on call: Vaccinate your kids. Talk to your neighbors and colleagues about why it is important.

Share family stories about lives affected by polio. Remind your senators that the secretary of Health and Human Services promised them he would not interfere with vaccine recommendations for polio and other diseases, and that, one by one, he has broken those promises.

If the federal government won’t take responsibility, then states, schools, pediatricians, summer camps, swimming classes and afterschool programs must step up and be proactive in protecting our children.

I fear it will only be when our children stop walking, or breathing, or die, that we will understand just how far we have been led astray. By then, it will be too late.    

Simone Blaser is a physician-scientist in infectious disease at Yale University. She is also a Public Voices Fellow of the Op-Ed Project in partnership with Yale.