Polio Ravaged My Family. Forget Its Horror at Your Peril.

One day when my mom was eleven years old, she found a photo in the attic of two small children who bore a resemblance to her and her brother. She brought the photo downstairs to her mother and asked who they were.

“Those are your two brothers,” she said. “They died of polio.”

On October 21, 1945, two and a half years before my mom was born, her brother—my uncle, Ronald Winard—died of polio at the age of three. Four days later, his older brother, Howard, died at the age of seven.

“Are they in heaven?” my mother remembers asking. She never forgot the answer that came back: “No, they are in the ground.”

Ronald Winard in 1942.

With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nominated to be Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, his long history of anti-vaccine activism is a significant worry of his critics. Kennedy is perhaps best known for promoting the debunked theory that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism. But he has also criticized the polio vaccine, which all 50 states require, even though it essentially eradicated the disease in the U.S.