Cell Strain

something between a steel coffin and an MRI. It's an iron lung. This place, this laboratory, stores the facts that matter and matters of fact. It lies in a time between now and then. A sign on the door reads the last archive. Step across the threshold to an elementary school classroom in the year nineteen fifty five. It's time for health class. Kids seated in wooden desks, lined up in rows on squeaky linoleum floors. The teacher in an a line skirt and pumps draws the blinds and wheels

out of projector. Today they're watching a film. The symptoms are quite familiar, they as it looks like a cold. Scientists think that most colds are caused by extremely small micro organisms called viruses viruses. This film is called Sniffles and Sneezes. It was made by McGraw hill Book Company. The first time I listened to it a few months ago, before the coming of the coronavirus, I thought it was quaint, sort of cute, sort of sweet, even a little silly.

But now, honestly, now it's haunting. You. See what you think is a simple cold could really be the first symptoms of some other disease, such as measles, infantile paralysis, diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever, influenzia, and others. Kids had to sit through films like this a lot in the nineteen fifties because of the incredible revolution in the biomedical sciences

in the first half of the twentieth century. Diseases had once been mysteries, but these mysteries began to yield to facts in the seventeenth century after the invention of the first microscopes, one scientists discovered micro organisms. Then came the germ theory of disease, and by the twentieth century modern vaccination. By the nineteen thirties, there were vaccines for a lot

of deadly diseases diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus. But people had to show up to get vaccinated or to get their children vaccinated, and that required believing in something you couldn't see except with a microscope or in a health class film. It wasn't just fourth graders who had to sit through films about viruses. Grown ups did too, because everyone needed to understand the nature of disease in order to understand the need for a vaccine. And in nineteen fifty five,

a very scary disease was still going around, polio. In the spring of that year, Vicky Merrick's brother Chris came home sick. He was three years old. He came down with something and he had a fever and he had cramps in his legs. And my father came home and I remember him telling or somebody telling me he was lying on the landing, you know, just sickly, and of course everybody was freaking out. And Chris told me that he daddy told him he was sick for like a

couple of weeks. I heard. It was much shorter that it passed, and then my mother came down with it. I met Vicky when we were working on the first episode of this podcast. She's a voice coach and she'd come to help me out. We got to talking about all the other episodes I was trying to write, including this episode about polio, and Vicky said, oh, my mother had polio. There was a time in the United States when everyone had a polio story about their family, or

their neighborhood, or someone they knew. Polio struck a whole generation. Vicky's father was a doctor. He and his wife had nine kids. First, little Chris got sick, and then Chris and Vicki's mother, Helen got sick. Heilen was thirty eight. She got it in the spring of fifty five. I think one day you'd be fine. Then you'd come home with a fever, a feeling of lightness, dizziness, weakness, and within days you might have lost the use of your legs and your arms, even your lungs, depending on how

far up the spinal column the virus took hold. You are looking at a killer at work. These are healthy living cells under attack by the virus of poliomyelitis. The virus itself is not visible. Its lethal effect is infection, reduced activity, abnormal rounding, and death. Polio was the most feared disease in the United States. Cancer killed more people, but polio attacked children, especially very little children. The disease

often left them crippled for life. The search for cure was one of the most important public health crusades in history. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and what it seems lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm Jillipour. This season, we're trying to solve a who'd done it? Who killed truth? In this episode, we're following the path of a pathogen, not just viruses,

but something They spawned fear of vaccination. In the nineteen fifties, the federal government opened a new department. At its center was a door with gilt letters that read Office of the Secretary. The woman inside liked to be called missus Secretary. Her name was a Vita Kulpe Hobby, the US's first Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. She was tiny. She was known for her glamorous hats. On a list of

the world's Best dressed Women. She was number eleven. When she took out a cigarette, ten men would jump to light it for her. She came from Texas. A reporter from Time magazine visited her once in that office. She looked small and feminine behind her broad mahogany esque but she moved with the poison competence of a successful business executive as she checked yes and no on a long

list of requests for appointments and telephone priorities. Now and then she paused reflectively and puffed on a parliament then turned back to work outside. Down through the mazes, corridors and channels of health, education, and welfare. The news was spreading that Avida Hobby was a lady in complete command. The lady in command had a lot on her to do list, including polio. The President really believed in her. She'd run the campaign Organization's Citizens for Eisenhower and had

helped the General win Texas. But Hobby had never been involved in medicine, or teaching, or social services. She was pretty much opposed to the federal government playing a role in any of those arenas. That was a plus, though, because Eisenhower felt the same way. He couldn't do the new deal because the public supported it, but he wanted to keep all the government programs he created as small as possible. He wanted to stop it from becoming a newer,

bigger deal. But a public health crisis like polio, that is a big deal. Let's those start from the beginning, back to the beginning of Hobby's life, which was also around the beginning of the polio epidemic in America and the beginning of vaccination, because those three stories are all tangled up together. Avida Kulp was born outside of Austin in nineteen oh five. She was the second of seven children. Her mother named her Avida because it rhmed with her

sister's name, Juanita. As a kid, Avida read the Congressional record for fun. She came from a political family. Her father was a Democrat, her mother a suffragist. They lived in the segregated South, where everything was segregated, including doctor's offices and hospitals. At the time, a lot of states had compulsory vaccination program especially for smallpox. Because of that, over the course of Avida's lifetime, smallpox all but disappeared.

That disappearance, though, led to a paradox, the more successful the vaccine, the lower the incidents and virulence of the disease. With a disease on the wane, more people start to doubt that the vaccines necessary. This is what always happens. It's as if when people can't see children dying the smallpox anymore, they decide that smallpox doesn't actually exist. The American Anti Vaccination League was founded in nineteen o eight. When Avita was three, organizations like it were popping up

all over the place. Then, early anti vaxxers thought that they spied a vast conspiracy, a well laid plan to medically enslave the nation. Soon the Anti Vaccination League was handing out pamphlets like this, one called the Crime against

the school Child. All compulsory vaccination law is based on a triple falsehood that compulsory vaccination on a heart or the whole of the population is necessary to prevent small pots epidemics, That nothing else prevents small pots epidemics but general vaccination, and that vaccination is perfectly safe and harmless and never causes injury or death. All of these propositions are absolutely and demonstrably false, and therefore any law based

on them is absolutely invalid. A century ago, the same Americans who railed against compulsory vaccination also railed against what they called compulsory insurance. In nineteen fifteen, when Avida was ten, it looked as though the US was finally about to pass legislation establishing a national health insurance program like most of the rest of the world, but conservative critics argued

that it would be Unamerican, unsafe, uneconomic, unscientific, unfair, and unscrupulous. Then, around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, and a master stroke that's still kicking around today, they decided to call it socialized medicine, and with that the plan was defeated. In nineteen sixteen, when Avita was eleven, the first major polio epidemic hit the US. It came mainly to New York.

The most reliable statistics suggest that in the epidemics first year alone, twenty seven thousand Americans got infected and six thousand died. It hit kids hardest. More than three quarters of those who died were children under the age of five. For a long time, polio, which is also called infantile paralysis, was known heartbreakingly as the baby plague in Texas, newspapers. Ivida's parents would have read all sorts of advice about

how to protect her. The disease is extremely infectious and contagious, particularly in the homes of the careless and the slovenly. Keep your house clean, keep the children clean, keep their bowels open, keep them away from crowds, and put them to bed early. But this advice, it turns out, probably wasn't much good. The pattern with other diseases had gone like this. The cleaner conditions got with the end of open air, sewers and privies, the lower the incidents of

infectious disease. But polio didn't follow that pattern. The better the hygiene, it seemed, the worse the polio. At the time, no one understood why. But it turns out that babies and young children exposed to the poliovirus while they're still breastfeeding or not long after weaning, they developed antibodies strong

enough to ward off an infection for life. Babies and young children most vulnerable were those who had never been exposed to the virus because they lived in antiseptic, hygienic places. Avida grew up picking cotton in Texas. She had the kind of not super spic and span childhood. That probably spared her. When Avida grew up, she decided to go into politics. She went to college for a couple of years, then left to sneak into law school classes at the

University of Texas. In nineteen thirty, she ran for the state legislature as a Democrat, but lost to a candidate who was a member of the KKK. The next year, when she was twenty six, she married a man twice her age, former Governor of Texas, William Pettis Hobby. She always called him Governor. He was the publisher of the Houston Post. She worked there as a writer when she married him, Then she became an editor. Later she took over altogether. The Hobbies had two children, who were sixteen

and eleven. During a particularly bad year for polio in Texas, somehow Vida's kids didn't get infected. Maybe she'd kept them inside. Good morning, boys and girls. Looks like Blondie and Dagwood are going to go out in a fishing party. Toby, you got any fishing music over there? Here as mine? That's Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis. On WCCO radio in nineteen forty six. You think stay at home campaigns

are new, they're not. We've been through this before. During bad years for polio, American cities and towns ran campaigns urging kids to stay indoors every day all summer long in order to avoid catching polio. Radio stepped in to help kids fight the boredom. Humphrey read the funnies out loud over the radio with his two kids at his side. There's Dagwood, kids, and there's Dagwood right along. There's right alongside the lake shore there, and he says, I don't

know why it is, I can't catch a fish. But Dagwood wasn't enough. Polio kept getting worse worse every year. Adults, of course, sometimes got it. Two Franklin dellan Or Roosevelt had gotten it in nineteen twenty one. Determined to find a cure, FDR helped found what became the March of Dimes. It's called that partly because kids would march around collecting dimes in ten cans for polio research. Avida Hobby and her husband had supported FDR when he ran for president

in nineteen thirty two. They were longtime Democrats, Southern conservative Democrats, so they opposed a lot of FDRs social programs. In nineteen forty two, Avida Hobby became a head of the Women's Army Corps. She was among the first woman ever to earn the rank of colonel. For her salary, she accepted a dollar a year. That's how she knew Dwight Eisenhower. He was the highest ranking man in the military. She was the highest ranking woman. By nineteen fifty two, Hobby

had abandoned the Democratic candidate. She'd grown tired of the new Deal she liked ike. On the campaign trail, Eisenhower announced a proposal that many Democrats supported the establishment of national health insurance. Instead of the patient getting more and better medical care for less, he will get less and poor medical care or more. In nineteen fifty two, the United States witnessed the worst polio epidemic in its history.

Fifty eight thousand Americans got infected everywhere. There were stories about suffering in interviews on the radio. But could you remember want to keep in mind, but all of these families that we're talking to today are just playing common ordinary American families. There isn't anything outstanding about them. You don't have to be the president of the United States or the President of Republic in order to get polio. You can be just a plain common, ordinary person like

me and you. Ordinary people, including really little kids, had ended up living in iron lungs. It's that machine you're hearing right now, a machine that could breathe for polio victims who couldn't breathe on their own. It must have been like living in a coffin. Little Richard Basil knew what that felt like. Hi, what you know, Richard Basil? I want to ask you a good question. How did you like bringing that iron one like them? And you didn't like it? A bill? Who did you feel like

they're really feeling to it at all? I felt cool, you felt air, and that era sort of did lots of things for this little two right, How do you certainly do look healthy? How old are you? Seven years old? And and here's a little seven year old guy that's going to go on to be president of the United States maybe or a ball player? How do you want

to be a ball player? A little fellow that's seven years old and he's going to be a baseball player, and of course he's going to be able to do that too if he wants to if he has the ability, it's up to him. But he's going to be able to do it because of this big guy in lunch to that we were talking about this big guy in lung, the thing that breathed into him, the breath of life. How are you feeling that it pretty good? Well, that's really well, thank you very much, Richard Basil and a

feminess is Basil. Well, I don't know about that interview. We sounds so heartless to me. That kid isn't going to grow up to play baseball. At the end of that terrible epidemic year nineteen fifty two, Eisenhower won the presidency, and he appointed the inimitable Evita Hobby to head what would become the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the department that would be charged with handling the polio crisis. Hobby was a dynamo. She oversaw one of the biggest

budgets of any department of the federal government. She was only the second woman ever to serve in the cabinet, and reporters found her irresistible. She works six days a week, with time off every Saturday afternoon for a hair due at Elizabeth Ardens. Her day begins at six thirty a m. With a thorough perusal of the newspapers, and she arrives at the office a little after nine. As a rule, work continues through lunch, invariably cottage, cheese or fruit salads,

with missus Secretary issuing orders as she eats. Most nights, Ovida hobby is hard at work until midnight. Someone else was hard at work that year. The man who would perfect a vaccine for polio a young, brilliant and ambitious virologist, doctor Jonas Salk. The story of the polio vaccine became a legend even as it was being reported. Working at Pittsburgh University's virus Research Laboratory, a forty year old doctor Salk labored three years, often sixteen hours a day, six

days a week, till painstakingly perfect a vaccine. Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine in nineteen fifty two. The problem was how to prove that it worked. Incredibly in nineteen fifty four, he ran a field trial on millions of children, starting with his own. Some of the kids in the study would get the vaccine, others would get a fake shot, and still others no shot at all. Even so, it

was the largest such medical test ever attempted. Four hundred and forty thousand youngsters in forty four stays were inoculated with the Salk vaccine, two hundred and ten thousand received dummy shots, and more than a million other children were observed. In comparison, not a single child who completed the Salk vaccinations died of paralytic polio. People who lived through this

time remember the vaccine announcement like it was yesterday. It was a public health triumph of victory for science the world truly, the world celebrated. Poliomyolitis or infantil paralysis is no longer the scourge it once was. Thanks to the killed virus vaccine developed by doctor Jonas Sack and first he was in nineteen fifty five, thousands have been spared death and crippling. That's the storybook version of the Stock vaccine.

The legend and much of that story is true, but it leaves out a few things, things that turn out to have to do with race, and especially with the federal government's authority to make decisions about health, education, and welfare.

The kids in the field trial to test whether they'd contracted polio, they'd have their blood drawn, but to tell whether that blood contained the virus, it had to be tested on sales that Laboratories involved in the field trial used cells that had been grown from a sample taken from a woman named Henriette Alas Jonah Sax. Field trial wouldn't have succeeded without those cells. This is where the story about polio becomes a story about race. In nineteen

fifty one, Henriet Alas went to the doctor. She was thirty, a black woman with five children. She had a terrible pain. She described it as a knot in her womb. She had cervical cancer, a very aggressive cancer. You might know about Henriette Alas if you've read a book by Rebecca Sclute called The Immortal Life of Henriette A. Lax. Sclute, with a lot of help from one of LAX's daughters, tells the story of how a cell biologist in Baltimore,

George Guy, scraped some cells from LAX's tumor. Then he kept those cells in his lab at Johns Hopkins without the knowledge or consent of Henriette Lacks. A few months later, a surgeon took still more cells from her tumor. They were unlike any cells anyone had ever seen before. Usually cells don't last long, but LAX's cancer cells lived and kept growing, and they grew fast, incredibly fast. Guy called the cell line the HeLa strain, after the first two

letters in each of her names. They became part of the fight against HIV AIDS. They're being used to study COVID nineteen. They've revolutionized medical research, but the ways they've been used have also raised all kinds of medical ethics issues. It also turned out that the HeLa cells were very susceptible to the poliovirus. Doctors had long believed that African Americans were immune to polio because it seemed to hit affluent,

white family's hardest, maybe because of their affluence. One theory was that wealthier families kept cleaner houses, which made their children less likely to be immune. But black children did get polio, and when they got sick, they were barred

from the best treatment centers. So the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college, founded its own polio research and treatment center, and in nineteen fifty three Tuskegee started a cell factory producing HeLa cells to be used in socks field trial. The Tuskegee Institute cell factory. The first cell factory ever was staffed by a team of black women's scientists, eventually thirty five of them. They worked in specially outfitted, air

conditioned laboratories. They used binocular microscopes. They pioneered the development of rubber screw tops for test tubes that they stacked in special stainless steel racks. At the peak of the project, they shipped twenty thousand cultures a week in boxes marked perishable biological material. The Black women at Tuskegee, growing cells from the cell line of Henrietta Lacks, eventually shipped some

six hundred thousand test tubes of HeLa cells. This part of the story wasn't entirely left out of the legend of Jonas sock I did find one mention of it in nineteen fifty five from a New York Times your story about twenty five Negro scientists and technicians are participating in the production of HeLa cells. About half of the

laboratories are using HeLa cells prepared on Tuskegee's campus. The Times described the HeLa cells as cells taken from a single human cancer which resulted in the death of a woman in Baltimore. They're protecting her anonymity, But the Times never mentioned that the cells came from a black woman. I have a theory about that particular silence. The Supreme Court had just ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation is unconstitutional, which had led to a resurgence

of white nationalism. That was the state of the nation at the time of Jonah Socks Field trials, trials that mixed the blood of white children with cells taken from a black woman. Probably that was just not a story the Times was willing to tell in nineteen fifty five. They wouldn't have wanted white people to not take the vaccine because it had come, even indirectly from a black woman.

The results of the Field trial finally came in on April twelfth, nineteen fifty five, and historic victory over a dread disease is dramatically unfolded at the University of Michigan. Here, scientists ush're in a new medical age with the monumental reports that prove the Salk vaccine against crippling polio to be a sensational success. It doesn't take any historical imagination these days to understand the relief the public must have

felt hearing the news that day. We all know what it feels like to wait for that day, for that news. The anticipation of getting everyone immunized, the prospect of ending the long days of staying at home. A vaccine. A vaccine, Thank god, a vaccine. It's a day of triumph for forty year old doctor Jonas Salk, developer of the vaccine. Hundreds of reporters and scientists from all over the nation

gather for the momentous announcement. Proudly on hand too or missus Salk and the sun who received the first injections. Reporters flooded a building at the University of Michigan to hear the announcement of the results of Sak's field trial to field trial that had been made possible by Tuskegee and the HeLa cells. They stampeded to get a hold of copies of the press release, and the entire world heralded the discovery, which assured an end to one of

mankind's most dread diseases. That night, Jonas Salk appeared on CBS's See It Now, interviewed by Edward R. Murrow, who owned the pattern on this vaccine well the people. I would say, there is no pat is. Could you patent the sun? Well, doctor sal what about the priorities? Who should determine who gets what in this limited supply situation? Well, I think it's unfair really to let everyone decide for himself who gets what. It would be as if everyone on your show decided what he wanted to do, if

and when he wanted to do it. It seems to me there ought to be some central intelligence that would indicate, at least suggest what should be done, if not specify. The scientists had done their part to protect kids from polio. Now the government needed to step up with its central intelligence a way to get the vaccine out to the public. The Congressional record shows that Secretary Hobby did express a lot of excitement. It's a great day. It's a wonderful

day for the whole world. It's a history making day. In parts of the world. With compulsory national insurance, the polio vaccine was rolled out right away. Ontario, Canada committed to provide free vaccines for all citizens between six months and twenty years old. Things went differently in the United States. The day after Sauk announced his vaccine, Avida Hobby appeared

before Congress. She struck down any suggestion that the distribution of the vaccine should be regulated by the federal government, or that vaccination should be compulsory if we were to try to put this on a regulatory basis, because of the length of tom it would take to achieve the regulatory basis, it is entirely possible that many children would thereby have been denied the shots. Okay, making regulations takes time,

and we don't have the time. Summer was coming, but the field trial had been going on for nearly two years. Why wasn't there a plan already set up ready to go. As a lady in command, Hobby could be famously, terrifyingly effective. Why had she dropped this ball? Eisenhower was getting frustrated. Kids were clamoring to go outside. Everyone knew the rate of polio infections rose with the heat. The clock was ticking. The President asked Hobby to report on her plan to

distribute the vaccine. It was just around this time, spring of nineteen fifty five, that Vicky Merrick's mother got sick. Vicky's mother, who had nine kids and new husband, was a doctor. Vicky was just a baby. Not yet one the littlest. Their father noted the progress of the disease in a tiny notebook that VICKI still got. I was searching for one of my dad's little notebooks because I know I've seen that that marking of his, like saying

at ten fifty two lungs. You know, like when Napolio was moving through her body before she went to the iron lung I remember seeing this, you know, rundown of like hily fever lungs something, and you know, it was kind of like running through the evening. I mean, I think it moved through her pretty quickly, and they finally said, all right, we gotta go to the iron lung. Well, Vicky's mother lay in a breathing machine in Massachusetts. Eisenhower

in Washington convened to cabinet meeting. I've got them minutes to that meeting here in the last archive. There is no transcript, just the minutes. Here's what went down. Eisenhower wonted Hobby to come up with a national plan for the federal government to distribute the vaccine free of charge. He wanted that plan yesterday, but Hobby had just sat on this request because she wanted the states to distribute the vaccine, or corporations, pharmaceutical companies, or charities, anyone but

the federal government, because she didn't want socialized medicine. Listen in, Eisenhower turns to a presidential medical advisor named Chester Keefer. How much would it cost to provide the vaccine to children who could not afford four dollars and twenty cents for three ccason enough for three shots? How much would it cost for a national program to provide the vaccine to every child whose family could not afford it. Ah, well, mister President, that's five states have already enacted laws to

provide these funds, and thirteen more are doing so. My department is now considering alternative proposals for financing shots for poor children, rather than announce a program of matching grants. Now, I want to see how many of the states will provide this themselves. The government's program should probably be limited to assist in those states who cannot do this. The government must ensure that, if necessary, federal funds will be forthcoming to cover the cost of the vaccine for children

who cannot afford it. No child must be denied the vaccine for financial reasons. If necessary, we should use the President's emergency fund, but some source must be found. It is not clear. We have not decided who would be the proper distributing agents, the Public Health Service, the Children's Bureau. There are only so many excuses hobby could come up with. Meanwhile, not only did the President presser for a plan, but the governors of every state ask for a department to

take charge. Then tragedy film. Hobbyhead licensed six pharmaceutical companies to manufacture the vaccine, but one of those companies failed to inspected samples was sufficient care. They prepared vaccines that actually caused polio. Vaccinated children became infected, some were crippled, and some died. At first, parents had rushed to get their kids vaccinated. Now, with this news overnight, a lot

of parents were terrified of the vaccine. That summer nineteen fifty five, Vicky Merrick's mother, Aileen, was still in the hospital in the Iron Lung Ward. She'd made a good friend there, a woman about her age named Lily Manning. Lily's husband, like Aileen's husband, was a doctor. He actually had the vaccine, had it at home in their fridge, ready to go, but at the last minute, he decided not to give it to his wife because he was worried about that bad batch, the bad batch that caused polio,

and then she got sick. Her story was very similar to my mother's anyway. So there's this batch waiting, and then this woman contracted it while she had the vaccine in the refrigerator. Was the Secretary Hobby's fault, Jesus? I think so? Anyway, she had to answer for it before

the Senate. Now, I wonder why it was necessary to delay action in making the survey until two days after the public announcement was made by doctor Salk and the Evaluating Committee, when there was every indication a long time in advance of that that this vaccine would at least be reasonably effective. A Democrat from New York press Hobby and why she'd failed even to make an initial survey of the problem until it was nearly already too late.

I would like to have some explanation, you would, well, I can give you part of it now. I would assume that this is an incident unique in medical history. I think no one could have foreseen the demand. I don't think the Senator need be troubled too seriously about this may I say, I am very sorely troubled. Finally, Hobby put together a plan. She declared that the federal

government would not take charge of vaccination or make it compulsory. Instead, it would allocate grants to the states to be used to distribute the vaccine to poor children. By then, Democrats had begun to call for Hobby's resignation. How could the United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare not have made a plan sooner? This is about as glaring an example of how a secretary of a government department should not act, because I have ever seen in the administration

of our government. The Senate called Hobby back for another grilling. But now some Republicans were ready to make this a bigger argument, a political argument about public health. Now, I think this gets down to the thing that both you and I are afraid of that where we have federal provisions, we have federal control. Is that not true? Well, they go hand in hand, or they walk very closely together, I should say. Senator Goldwater, the arch conservative Barry Goldwater

of Arizona, saw things Hobby's way. Compulsory vaccination, compulsory health insurance. It all led in one direction. If this situation ever came about in this country, and let us pray that it never does. Is there any other term for it than socialized medicine, that is, socialized medicine by the back door and knock by the front door. Missus Secretary, you have just said what constitutes my greatest fear about this approach.

By July of nineteen fifty five, more than four million American children had received a polio vaccination, and it worked. Polio would never again plague the country the way it had plagued it for so many years. Later that month, Avida Hobby resigned from Eisenhower's cabinet. She said she was leaving to care for her elderly husband. That summer, Vicky Merrick's mother, Aileen, was still in the Iron Lung Ward.

All the patients had mirrors at the ends of their beds, so that even while lying down, they could look a little bit around the room. Lily Manning, the friend she'd met there, was later interviewed by a newspaper about their time on that ward. When I went to see VICKI, she read that interview to me. One after another of the days came when a nurse would walk by each lung, turning each mirror down. They lowered the mirrors whenever a

body had to be passed between us. Manning says, they'd roll it by to get to work cleaning the lung, and a little while later another patient was put in. Lily Manning and Aileen Merrick were realists. They would not dance again, but they would go home, and Marek was determined not to spend her life in an iron lung. In December of that year, Vicki and her eight brothers and sisters went to see their mother in the hospital. Vicky has a photograph the boys with their crew cuts,

the girls in beautiful dresses. Is everybody in their Sunday clothes and then a priest, a cardinal standing by. So this is I think it was like a Christmas Eve something where Cardinal Cushing like set a mass for the family and came in and they let us into the hospital to sit with my mom. So yeah, there is everybody and my dad wow, and this is your yeah, oblivious. Vicky's mom would joke about it that visit from the cardinal, and she had a pretty you know, classic Irish you know,

Gallows sense of humor. She goes, no, no, seriously, where can you read the newspaper, listen to the radio, eat your lunch, move your bowels, and visit with his eminence all at the same time. Finally, on Mother's Day nineteen

fifty six, Vicky's mom got to come home. When she came home and she was in a wheelchair, she was ripping through the house and just like breathless, but going this places a pig sty and you know, like yelling at everybody about whatever, and and so I think that there was this fake out, like maybe my brothers and everybody thought, oh, she's back. Just a few days later, she got pneumonia, but she wouldn't go back to an

iron lung. She was determined. And for a long time, I think maybe I was mad at her because I thought that she chose not to go back in time into an iron lung. But I think that she was just like I can't go back into an iron lung, Like I can't live my life like that. I don't know. Eileen Merrick died that May nineteen fifty six. The wake was held at their house. Vicky remembers as a little

girl being confused. They were making all these sandwiches and I could tell everybody was like bustling around, like as if we were having a party. And there she is in the room, in her open coffin, and I kept saying, why is mummy taking a nap? If we're having a party, why is she resting? Now, you know, it could strike anybody anywhere. It was so devastating that many of its

victims were paralyzed in spirit, as well as Bonnie. When Avida Hobby resigned, Eisenhower said he greatly regretted her departure. He agreed with the Secretary of the Treasury, who told her, you're the best man in the cabinet. Hobby left Washington, but the political schisms she'd help make only grew wider. One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or so sism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a

humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it. That's the actor Ronald Reagan, just a few years later, in nineteen sixty one, turning himself into a political candidate by setting out his agenda, he would wage a war against creeping socialism by fighting against socialized medicine, by which he meant at the time Medicare. But he also set out to fight public trust in the idea

that big government can solve big problems. Avidahabi went back to Texas and ran the Houston Post for years. She died in nineteen ninety five at the age of ninety. Three. Years later, a claim started circulating that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism. That set in motion a new anti vaccination movement. In the year two thousand, the Centers for Disease Control declared that measles had been eliminated in the United States, sparing thousands of children and early death.

It turned out that announcement was premature. By twenty nineteen, the government was battling multiple outbreaks of measles. Nearly ninety percent of those infected had never been vaccinated. A quarter of the world's population is now living under some form of lockdown due to coronavirus. More than three billion people in almost seventy countries and territories have been asked to

stay at home. The worldwide pandemic of COVID nineteen the contagion, the deaths, the isolation, the economic shock, the race for a vaccine, iron lungs replaced by ventilators. All that was not lurking in my mind as I researched this episode, because it hadn't happened yet. Instead, I'd been thinking about long ago viruses and about other older patterns that kept the United States from adopting universal health insurance. I'd been

investigating a crime, the killing of truth. It had felt like a metaphor when I began, before people started dying. Researching this episode. I wanted to find out the mechanism by which people had come to be suspicious of vaccines, and it seemed to me that it has something to do with the opposition to universal healthcare. But there was something else going on too, a forgetting. I called an expert.

You see him in the news all the time these days, talking about the coronavirus, doctor William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt and the medical director of the National Foundation for Invectious Diseases. It must be now about ten years ago. I was just speaking. Asked to speak to a group of parents, largely moms, who were vaccine skeptical they wanted information,

so they gathered about. There were somewhere between twenty or thirty of them, and I decided that I wasn't trying to persuade anybody of anything, but I would tell them first about the diseases. And I was talking about one or another and began then to talk about poliomyelitis polio, and one of the ladies there got a very quizzical look on her face, and I said, let's stop for a moment, missus Jones, and as you seem confused about something, ask a question and then we can go on. And

she said, why are you suddenly talking about shirts? So she mixed up polio with of course the manufacturer polo vaccination provides what's called herd immunity. Everyone needs to do it, the whole herd. It's about trusting science, but it's also about having a sense of commonweal, the common good. That's what we don't have. I kept hearing in my head something Vicky Merrick told me about a letter she'd written to her father, the physician, while she was trying to

come to terms with the loss of her mother. He wrote me back on a prescription piece of paper which he would do sometimes, and he just wrote on the pad on the prescription pad was like PS, regarding your motherless childhood. It's crippling, but not paralyzing. Love Dad. I guess I sometimes feel that way about American history. The burdens of this past, the beauty, the horror, the gift, the loss, the people who lived through it remember the rest of us only think we're immune, or at least

we used to think that. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane mccabbon and Bennette of Haaffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez are our engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagens Infinett. Many of verse oun effects are

from Harry Janett Jr. And The Star Jenette Foundation. Our full proof players are Barlow Adams and Daniel Burger Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The Last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater, Alex Allenson in the Bridge Sounding Stage, Philip Brush, The March of Dimes, and the w NYC Archives at Pushkin. Thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Kanig, Carly mcgliori, Emily Rostick,

Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta'reilly, Oliver Riskin Kutz and Emily Spector. I'm Jill Lapoor