Terry Donnelly: Vaccination saves lives; one may be your own

##Terry Donnelly

About the writer: Terry Donnelly is a 79-year resident of Planet Earth, a 51-year-resident of Oregon and an 11-year resident of Yamhill County. Now making his home on McMinnville’s west side, he confesses, “my only credentials are age and experience.”

Our continuing controversy regarding dissemination of vaccination information for COVID and other diseases, leading to political distortion or limitation of that information, persuades me to share my experiences with communicable diseases — and to offer some observations.

One of the most vivid memories I retain from my early 1950s childhood is an image of my young neighbor being wheeled out of her home on a gurney. She was covered by a sheet or a blanket that had been pulled up over her head, and we thought that meant she was dead.

But we were told Geraldine wasn’t dead. She had polio, and the face cover was meant to protect the rest of us from contagion.

In the context of that era, Geraldine was lucky. She returned home a few months later wearing metal leg braces and walking with the aid of forearm-latching metal crutches.

I don’t know what ever happened to her, but if I search online for her name in our home town, I can see that she graduated from high school some years later. I hope that she has had a great and long life.

Not all polio patients were that fortunate. Some died. Many were severely disabled. Even the relatively lucky ones had their lives radically altered.

I was lucky, too. I have another early memory, probably from a year or two later, of lining up with my elementary school classmates for my Salk polio vaccination.

For several years thereafter, we continued to see people, especially young people, maneuvering in wheelchairs or walking with the aid of braces and crutches.

But I never saw anyone with an active case of polio after Geraldine. Within that decade what had been an annual epidemic that reached over 50,000 paralytic cases per year in the US fell to fewer than 1,000 per year.

My good fortune continued through the 1950s, as I contracted but fully recovered from measles, chickenpox, mumps, whooping cough and German measles, also known as rubella. Every kid I knew caught these, as they were so common they were collectively referred to as “the childhood illnesses.”

Most of us recovered, except for our late-in-life propensity for shingles triggered by chicken pox. But not all.

Some kids died from these diseases. Others suffered debilitating and lasting injury.

One by one, researchers came up with vaccines for all of the above. Thanks to those vaccines, one generation later, my grown children have never seen an active case of any of these once nearly omnipresent illnesses.

Within my lifetime we have benefited immensely from a confluence of popular, academic, commercial and political support for the discovery, production and distribution of vaccines. Technological advances have also contributed to this progress, helping scientists accelerate research that once took years to conduct, now sometimes achieving major breakthroughs in months.

What had been almost universally appreciated as wonderful medical progress became viewed more skeptically, and in some cases fearfully, after 1998. That year, a British researcher published a paper in The Lancet purportedly linking vaccine ingredients with autism.

This was later exposed as a fraud, and The Lancet published a full retraction. But by then, great damage had been done to public confidence in vaccinations.

Now we have the internet, where uninformed opinions and intentional misinformation are fast-tracked into our cultural and political lives.

Vaccination rates — not just against COVID, but all the “childhood diseases” — are falling as a consequence. So both the risk and the reality of returning us to periodic outbreaks of these illnesses are rising.

Any medication can have unintended positive or negative side effects. Looking for and understanding side effects is as central to clinical trials as looking for efficacy.

In fact, this part of the review process continues both before and long after any approval is granted. Products presenting unnecessary or excessive risk relative to benefit are either removed from the market or never granted approval to reach the public in the first place.

I’m not naive enough to believe any medicines are perfect. I understand severe reactions are possible.

However, I accept the medical judgment that severe reactions are highly unlikely and any risk associated with an approved product is outweighed by protective benefits, both to the individual patient and to others in the community.

Our political officeholders and candidates should be encouraging constituents to follow the best medical guidance on vaccination, and to seek that information from the most reliable sources they can find. Politicians should not be filtering or distorting that information to fit their own opinions or agendas.