This is a sort of personal musing after such a long hiatus for Covid times. But this morning, this headline was in my daily newspaper:
"VACCINATED WORKERS BANNED AT FLA. PUBLIC SCHOOL"
The story went on to say that a school has been established by anti-vaxers, and they would not hire anybody who had had a covid shot. I'm assuming these guys were born yesterday. If they were as old as I am (80), they would remember a world without many of them, and the fear and misery this lack used to cause.
I'm glad I've reached this age, but 100 years ago I certainly wouldn't have reached it. Aside from surgeries for a few parts replacements, I was born in 1941, and at that time there were no antibiotics to treat sicknesses, and few vaccines to prevent them. We were all vaccinated against smallpox at birth, and as little kids we were vaccinated against diphtheria and tetanus, but that was about it.
Lack of birth control aside, one of the reasons that people had so many kids up to the early 20th century and earlier was because it wasn't unusual to lose a few of them to lethal childhood diseases. There was nothing much to do but pray if your child got sick. The shots we take for granted now didn't exist then, and the general attitude was to let your kids catch measles, mumps, chickenpox and whooping cough, and hoped they'd recovered fine, because then they'd have immunity. I managed to dodge the bullet of whooping cough but got all three of the others when I was six and got the measles so badly that I was delirious and had a temperature of 104. I was lucky that I recovered, and with outside effects that sometimes come with it. We tend to forget that Measles wiped out more native Americans than wars did.
In the bad old days, people would hear or read in the news about imminent epidemics and knew that they couldn't do anything about it but wait for it to come and pass and hope they didn't get it. In my childhood, before the Polio vaccine, parents would dread each summer, the usual season for the disease. I played with my next-door neighbor the day before he came down with it, and my mom was petrified for a few weeks, until it was evident that I didn't catch it. I did get rheumatic fever, though--that comes off a strep infection and there were no antibiotics then. Luckily, that was just after World War II, and penicillin had just been released for the general public and I was able to get it.
Public health measures, when available, were more draconian too. In 1947, I was growing up in New York, and a man landed in the city from abroad with smallpox. No matter if we were vaccinated against it at birth, who knew how long that protection would last? My entire elementary school, students, teachers and staff were taken down to the cafeteria one day and we were all vaccinated again. More than a million schoolkids were inoculated en masse when the Salk vaccine came out, and the rest of us got it as soon as we could.
The Covid epidemic is a wakeup call. For a year, we experienced what our grandparents did with far more frequency. Nobody realizes how awful these sicknesses are until
you get them. I got my covid shots as soon as they were available. I'm still here and would like to be here for a while longer.
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For an amazing website on the history of Vaccines, see:
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