Elvis Isn't Here To Protect Us From The Next Polio Epidemic

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Common Dreams, Jan. 2, 2025. Ed.🥼PHOTO: Elvis Presley being vaccinated on Ed Sullivan show, Oct. 1956. - 'Elvis Isn't Here to Protect Us From the Next Polio Outbreak.' - Defense against dangerous epidemic outbreaks requires constant vigilance. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump headed to Wash., D.C., we are entering very troubling territory.
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Elvis Presley hardly seems a likely candidate for the pantheon of public health heroes. But in Oct. 1956 the ascending rock idol lent his considerable stardom to helping save lives.

His little remembered role is a cautionary tale as incoming President Trump advances a series of farright and unqualified appointees to major public agencies. The most dangerous is likely to be conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, augmented by like-minded, perilous public health heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Federal Drug Administration (FDA), and his choice for Surgeon General.

For a century, polio epidemics made it one of the world’s most terrifying diseases. A 1916 outbreak in New York City killed over 2,000 people; another in the U.S. in 1952 claimed over 3,000. Children were especially targeted, over 60,000 infected yearly, facing lifelong severe spinal injuries requiring braces, crutches, and wheelchairs, and the dreaded iron lung, an artificial respirator, or premature death.

Wealth and status proved no barrier, as evidenced by President Franklin Roosevelt who was diagnosed at age 39 in 1921 with polio and endured it the rest of his life. What was a safeguard was the first vaccine, developed by virologist/medical researcher Jonas Salk. The announcement on April 12, 1955 by Univ. of Michigan School of Public Health scientist Thomas Francis, Jr., who declared it “safe, effective, and potent,” was greeted as a national celebration, spread rapidly over radio, television, and wire services.

Parents lined up to vaccinate their young children, plenty did not. Teen immunization levels stagnated at just 0.6% . Enter Elvis. He agreed to go on the popular Ed Sullivan TV show, not to sing, but to get publicly vaccinated, viewed by millions. Vaccination rates among American youth soared to 80% in just 6 months. Overall annual cases of polio plummeted within a year from 58,000 to 5,600.

By 1961, only 161 cases remained. After an oral vaccine followed, polio disappeared in the U.S. completely.

Yet polio never vanished globally, especially in underdeveloped nations, as in Africa, and in war zones, including in Gaza today...
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/elvis-isn-t-here-to-protect-us-from-the-next-polio-outbreak
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- 'Are We Ready for Another Pandemic,' The Guardian, Jan. 2, 2025,
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jan/02/are-we-ready-for-another-pandemic