With the polio vaccine in the news, I want to tell some of my mom's story:

Rob Ricci 🎄

My mom got polio when she was a kid living in southern California, pre-vaccine. She survived it, but it put her in a wheelchair for a while, then leg braces. She was actually a literal poster child for the Polio vaccine: they used her picture on some March of Dimes posters.

But this was not a thing that just affected her for a while, and then she was better. As a result of having Polio, her right leg is slightly shorter than her left. For her entire life, she's had to have special lifts put into her right shoe. When she drives, she uses her left foot for the brake pedal because she's concerned that her right leg might not be strong enough to stomp on the brake hard if needed. She has always been limited in how long and far she can walk: I remember many times on family vacations where the rest of us would go off to do something and she'd have to sit it out because she knew she just couldn't do that much walking.

Now that she's elderly, a lifetime of this is catching up: her bones, joints, ligaments, tendons are all messed up from having a weak leg and an unbalanced gait. Her mobility is declining much faster than it should be, even for someone of her age. She had to have her ankle fused because of the constant pain it was causing.

Polio didn't ruin her life, but it has stolen it in slices. Times she couldn't keep up with her kids, times she was just too tired to be able to stay on her feet, chronic pain, losing the ability to climb stairs in her own house as she ages.

Vaccination is the greatest public health success humanity has ever produced, and we forget this only at our own peril.

atsuzaki

@ricci antivaxxers makes me so angry as someone who grew up in parts that are too poor and too brown for the rest of the world to prioritize making vaccines for. we *still* live in a reality today where everyone knows someone who died very young due to infectious diseases, while being forced to watch these privileged first worlders, so distant from death and suffering, reject vaccines.

Nicole Parsons

@atsuzaki @ricci

The aspect that disturbs me the most is the precision selectivity of antivaxxer ideology.

ALL Republican billionaires are vaccinated while advocating antivaxx ideology for everyone else.

Their kids are certainly vaccinated but they want you & yours not to get vaccinated.

We know the reasons why.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/12/13/when-depicting-government-bad-is-more-important-than-stopping-polio/
Racism. Bigotry. Class. Greed.

Contempt for the poor, elderly, disabled, young, uneducated, and workers.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/dec/18/rupert-murdoch-receives-dose-of-covid-vaccine-in-uk

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/15/fox-news-vaccines-testing-tucker-carlson