Talk to anyone who lived through the 1950s and they’ll remember when schools shut down for polio outbreaks and families lived in fear of measles, mumps, and diphtheria sweeping through neighborhoods. During evening prayers, they asked for protection for their family.
This wasn’t hysteria. It was reality:
- Before the polio vaccine was licensed in 1955, tens of thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands of people had some sort of permanent paralysis.
- The United States suffered a German measles (rubella) outbreak between 1964 and 1965 and while not a death sentence, more than 12.5 million people got Rubella. In fact, some 11,000 pregnant women suffered miscarriages, more than 2,000 newborn babies died and there were a reported 20,000 babies born with cataracts, heart complications or mental disabilities directly because of rubella.
Now? According to the CDC, cases of polio or rubella complications in the U.S. are virtually zero and the ones that do occur are in those who are unvaccinated.
That’s not magic. That’s science. Herd immunity works.
And yet our collective memory is as short as a goldfish’s. We just lived through a Covid-19 pandemic that killed more than 1.1 million Americans (CDC, 2025) with countless others still struggling with physical and mental complications. It wrecked our economy and social behaviors changed forever. So why are these things — polio, rubella and Covid — less of a threat today? Vaccines. Again, this is not mysticism but science.
I grew up seeing the inoculation scars on the arms of my mother and her siblings. They remembered the threat, which is why they were among the first to line up for the Covid vaccine. They knew their own parents would have done anything for a shot that could protect their babies. Refusing vaccines today is a slap in the face to generations of Americans who understood vaccination as a social contract — a way of protecting not just their families, but their neighbors as well as those who are immunocompromised and can’t physically get vaccines. Are we really so selfish?
What’s at stake now is nothing less than decades of scientific progress. Childhood infectious diseases nearly disappeared, but they’re now creeping back, fueled by anti-vaccine rhetoric and the high visibility but low scientific credibility of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I understand the argument that vaccination is a personal choice. But public health is what allows all of us to live fruitful, safe lives. The truth is simple: When people opt out, diseases we eradicated come roaring back.
Florida is a flashpoint right now with proposals to end school vaccine mandates (Miami Herald, 2025). I’d think twice about moving there or taking my kids to Disney. In the end, it’s children who pay the price for the decisions adults make. What would you tell your children if you refused to vaccinate them and they ended up sick or worse? That you hoped everyone else around them would take responsibility? That supplements or prayer alone would be enough?
The truth is vaccines are safe and effective with very minimal side effects. They are the reasons that most reading this article have most likely not have had any preventable disease like measles, mumps, rubella or polio.
So what now? What will South Carolina do? What will you do? If the decision is left to individuals, how will you protect not just yourself, but your community?
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