I remember lining up in the National Guard armory in our little Wyoming town to receive the sugar cube with the vaccine. I was probably between 5 and 6 at the time. Younger folks simply don’t understand how horrible polio was, because they’ve never seen it firsthand.
Sugar cube, yes, at my elementary school. The polio epidemic is the only thing in my lifetime comparable to this.
I had to get re-vaccinated for polio a few years ago. It was an injection.
It’s the end goal of GOP politics. Everything government related is bad. Well other than the police or military, that agree with them. It’s absolutely abhorrent.
I didn’t realize it was so high until I just looked it up, but HIV/AIDS killed 450,000-700,000 people in the US. Still kills 10,000s of people every year around the world.
You didn’t realize it because the public messaging in the 80s was that gay deaths didn’t matter.
I was working in epidemiology at the time and nothing in Covid-19 scares me for humanity like HIV did back then. Like many open-minded people living in a large city, I had scores of gay friends, and for awhile it looked like every single one of them would die, often very young and not even at the peak of life yet. It was devastating each time I heard a friend was in the hospital, knowing they would not make it out alive. I will never forget that nightmare. Even today, 30 years later, just thinking about it is debilitating, as the faces of lost friends flash across my mind.
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They won’t even wear a mask
Trump is wearing a mask today, his internal polling has to be horrendous.
SMH. There are a lot of idiots in America.
Of course, I was aware of the HIV-AIDS sickness sweeping the country and killing everyone infected. I was not frightened by it because I was not going to engage in the behaviors which risked the illness. None of my gay friends had it, at least as far as I knew. I certainly never heard anyone in my orbit say “gay deaths don’t matter.”
Polio did and COVID does infect everyone, regardless of age, gender, race, or lifestyle, and often today people who are trusted as being absolutely safe are asymptomatic carriers. Polio terrified me when I was a kid because of the images of iron lungs, and COVID today makes me wary and avoid “normal” social interaction with virtually everyone. I had empathy for and was sad for those who died of AIDS, and I believed it was a national tragedy and hoped/wished/prayed for a cure, but that disease did not touch me or my life personally as polio and this virus have.
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Aids shaped Houston in a lot of ways; probably most in the formation of the Legacy health system. I was young, single, and I remember it as a pretty anxious time, even if I was only engaging in behaviors, not particularly risky behaviors. Our firm did have two partners who died of aids, and I was always proud of how we helped them.
I remember two odd conversations, one with a woman who said she wouldn’t go into a Montrose restaurant any more because you didn’t know who was handling knives in the kitchen, and one in a
Bible class where the teacher said that Aids was likely God’s punishment of Gays. I reckon this time around I’m avoiding restaurants, but I don’t think God is punishing anybody. If God wanted to punish anybody he’d send a plague of frogs.
. . . or Donald Trump.
You are right they are very different, but was just trying of think of something similar in my own life.
And I was only speaking for me and my life.
15,000 new cases in Florida reported today.
That’s a new record for Florida by several thousand and a new record for daily cases for any state, again by several thousand.
Disney World is set to re-open.
What was New York’s worst day? <<edited to add: 11,571 on 15 April>>
Part of me is actually interested in sitting down with a COVID denier / hoax apologist and listening to their “rationale” for suggesting / thinking this thing that’s happening right in front of all of us is not really happening.
I’m just too young to have missed the polio scare. I have no doubt it is likely unparalleled in modern history. Once, my father took me to a small cemetery in “hard scrabble” Texas, outside Brownwood, so I could know where some of my relatives were buried. The cemetery had rows upon rows of small crosses where polio victim infants and children were buried. Unforgettable, taking-of-breath moment.