On Vaccines and the Ghosts of Christmas Past
To: Ebenezer Scrooge
Newman’s Court
Cornhill Street
London, England
Dear Ebenezer Scrooge:
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens documents your change from an old, self-centered miser to a person concerned with healing a crippled boy, “Tiny Tim” Cratchit. We thought those Christmas ghosts left a month ago, but we need them now.
Today, there are few people old enough to remember the absolute horrors of children and young adults crippled by polio. If you are not visited by a Christmas ghost, ask a person who is at least 75 years old about polio. Their eyes will betray a flicker of fear. Let me try to be a ghost of Christmas past and bring some of that fear into the present.
My third-grade class at Oakdale Elementary School in West St. Paul did not have a Tim, but we did have a Tom. One day in early fall, Tom was absent. Several months later, but before the holidays, Miss Moore, our teacher, said that Tom had polio and we were all going to visit him in the hospital. We were taken to a room where Tom lay in an iron lung, flat on his back and only able to see us through an angled mirror. The iron lung made a wheezing sound. Later, back in our classroom, we all wrote notes to Tom wishing him a happy holiday and promising to visit often. We never saw him again.
All of us from that period had other classmates with withered arms or with legs that required built-up shoes. Arm braces and leg braces were not absent from our classrooms. No one could escape the ghost of polio.
World War II and the Great Depression saw the United States succeed under the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. How do we commemorate FDR today? Look in your pocket or wherever you keep loose change. You may find a dime that features the bust of FDR. Why the dime?
FDR helped establish the March of Dimes, a countrywide charity devoted to the treatment and cure of polio, a disease that rendered FDR unable to walk. Funds from the March of Dimes supported research by, among others, a young virologist named Jonas Salk who devoted seven years of his life to developing a polio vaccine. No Christmas gift, no gift from the ghost of Christmas future, could match the gift that Jonas Salk revealed in April 1955—a successful polio vaccine. And a gift it was: Dr. Salk refused to seek a patent or profit from his work, because he wanted everyone to have access to the vaccine. Polio epidemics were brought to a halt by Salk and his vaccine. Worldwide epidemics of 500,000 people and 50,000 children annually in the United States dropped to just one case in 1993. Polio was essentially eliminated from the United States.
Hospitals no longer have iron lung floors. Classrooms no longer hear the creak of arm and leg braces. Crippled Tiny Tim is no longer a sight where children gather and play. But people forget the great debt of gratitude owed to the scientists who develop vaccines and follow the lead of Dr. Salk. Childhood diseases of measles, diphtheria, tetanus, mumps, and rubella have all been drastically reduced because of highly effective vaccines.
A good Christmas ghost would point out that we have gotten much better at developing vaccines. Within 11 months, on Dec. 8, 2020, the first Covid vaccine was administered outside of clinical trials. A 2022 study by the Imperial College London published in The Lancet estimated that this worldwide Covid vaccination program prevented 19.8 million excess deaths. You don’t have to talk to a 75-year-old friend or relative to understand this success—we all saw it and benefited from it.
But what you don’t see is the specter of the scariest ghost of all, the ghost of Jacob Marley. He resembles Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Trump nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services. This nomination was so scary that the first polio victim in Martin County, Minnesota (1955), Donald Post, wrote to a local newspaper to protest. The Senate confirmed RFK as health secretary in February anyway.
We are too smart to be fooled by these people. We know how to defeat the chains of disease that have killed and crippled too many of us. We understand, like Scrooge, that embracing science will allow all of us to lead happier and more productive lives. As Tiny Tim would say if he were here, “God bless us everyone.”
Sincerely,
Vance K. Opperman
For a healthy 2025
This column originally appeared in the February/March 2025 print issue with the headline “Return of the Ghosts of Christmas.”
