Sam Julsen, a pharmacist at Medicap Pharmacy in Jefferson, holds up a vial of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, which has been found to be 94.1 percent effective against COVID-19. Even so, Julsen has seen a sharp decline in the number of people making appointments to receive a shot. “There are so many asymptomatic cases around. That’s what’s scary,” she says. ANDREW McGINN | JEFFERSON HERALDSandy (Bauer) King was the first Greene County child to receive the polio vaccine on May 3, 1955. “That vaccine made such a difference,” King, now 72, says. “This vaccine will too. I don’t know why people are so reluctant.”Medicap pharmacist Sam Julsen doesn’t understand the hesitancy of many people toward the COVID-19 vaccine. “It went through all the steps every vaccine goes through,” she says. “It has been studied.” ANDREW McGINN | JEFFERSON HERALDIn a famous photo, Elvis Presley gets his polio shot backstage of “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1956. Despite the assertion by one outspoken media figure of the day that the vaccine “may be a killer,” Americans lined up to do their part to eradicate polio.

THE REFUSAL TO BARE ARMS

Local vaccine hesitancy a far cry from the days of polio

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com

See if this sounds at all familiar:

It’s a highly contagious virus, but in 95 percent of all cases, the infected person will remain asymptomatic. At best, one in four people might develop symptoms described as flu-like.

At worst, the virus has the ability to affect the brain and spinal cord, resulting in paralysis. But those scenarios make up fewer than 1 to 2 percent of cases.

On the same exact day a vaccine was announced as safe and effective, the government licensed it — and just 21 days later, the first shots were being administered in Greene County.

One outspoken figure in the media warned his audience that this new vaccine “may be a killer.”

This next part, however, is where the well-known story of polio diverges from the story still being written about COVID-19.

In the spring of 1955, it was estimated that 99 percent of Greene County parents consented to have their first- and second-grade children receive the poliomyelitis vaccine that Jonas Salk had developed using an inactive, or “killed,” poliovirus.

The school superintendent in Scranton reported receiving nearly 100 percent approval from parents of first- and second-graders for them to receive the first of what would be three polio shots that Tuesday in May at the Greene County Hospital.

Sixty-six years later, it remains to be seen what parents will do now that the Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for adolescents ages 12-15.

After all, a good many of the parents themselves are hesitant to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, a phenomenon that is slowing the overall vaccination effort. Locally, the race to vaccinate has been reduced to a crawl.

Taylor Anglemyer, owner of Medicap Pharmacy in Jefferson, said Friday he hasn’t had to reorder vaccine in two weeks from the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program, the federal government’s collaborative effort with pharmacies to put the COVID-19 vaccine within five miles of reach to 90 percent of the public.

That, according to Anglemyer, is simply a stunning turn of events.

“It went from me saying, ‘Give me 500 shots and I’ll get them out in a week and a half’ to ‘I don’t know if I can get rid of 10,’” he said. “It was almost overnight.”

Sam Julsen, a new pharmacist at Medicap, puts it like this: “There’s no one out there begging for a dose we have not vaccinated.”

The thing is, there are still many more unvaccinated people in Greene County than vaccinated people. As of May 3, 36 percent of Greene County residents had been fully vaccinated, according to Greene County Public Health — a slight increase from 30 percent on April 19.

Nationally, as of May 10, just 34.8 percent of the total U.S. population is now vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The rate of vaccination is almost sure to pick up once shots start going to tweens, but as it stands, Anglemyer and Julsen went from administering 70 shots a week at Medicap to just nine.

The hesitancy is palpable.

“The word is out,” Anglemyer explained. “Everyone knows you can get a shot, and they know where to get them.”

Monday’s announcement by the FDA authorizing the Pfizer vaccine for use in adolescents ages 12-15 is sure to be met with some relief — that is, among parents who are presumably already vaccinated themselves.

The Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been tracking public opinion on the vaccine, announced on May 6 that just three in 10 parents of kids 12-15 say they’ll get their child vaccinated as soon as they can.

A quarter of parents say they will “wait and see,” while nearly a quarter of parents say they’ll definitely not get their child vaccinated.

Following a clinical trial involving 2,260 participants ages 12-15, the FDA says vaccine side effects in kids are consistent with those in people 16 and older.

Greene County Public Health Director Becky Wolf said Wednesday they plan to “meet kids wherever they might be this summer,” beginning with school-based COVID-19 vaccine clinics at each district prior to the last day of school, with parental/guardian consent.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the hesitancy is most pronounced among Republican voters. While the number of Republicans who say they’re “definitely not” getting a shot decreased to 20 percent in April from 29 percent in March, it’s still a substantially larger number of holdouts than Democrats and independents.

For their part, more than half of Republicans now say they’ve gotten at least one dose or will do so soon, according to Kaiser.

“Part of it is the internet and all the false information out there,” said Sandy King, a retired medical technologist in Lincoln, Neb. “That has done a lot of harm.”

King, 72, holds a small place of distinction in local history as the first Greene County child to receive the polio vaccine back on May 3, 1955.

The former Sandra Bauer was a Churdan first-grader at the time and the first in line to receive a shot — a process that would be repeated 577 more times that day. (Of the 67 Churdan kids who were vaccinated, only four parents declined the shot, according to the paper.)

Polio may have crippled only a small percentage of the people it infected, but parents simply couldn’t have been more ecstatic to get their kids vaccinated.

In that regard, King is like a kid again — she couldn’t wait to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

Maybe not coincidentally, those who can actually remember the scourge of polio — the outbreaks that would invariably occur during the summer months, causing swimming pools to close — are more likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Among Greene County adults 65 and older, 76 percent were fully vaccinated as of May 3. Nationally, as of May 10, 71.5 percent of adults 65 and older are now fully vaccinated.

A polio surge in 1952 alone resulted in more than 21,000 cases of paralysis in the United States.

“That vaccine made such a difference,” King said of the first polio vaccine developed by Salk. “This vaccine will too. I don’t know why people are so reluctant.”

“At this point,” she added, “I can’t imagine people thinking this isn’t real.”

 

The Cutter incident

The polio vaccine, come to find out, wasn’t without its risks.

Just five days after Greene County first- and second-graders received their first shots — the first age group to be eligible — the vaccination effort was suspended following reports in other parts of the country of polio in recently vaccinated kids.

In all, 11 children died and hundreds more were paralyzed nationally after receiving the polio vaccine manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, of Berkeley, Calif., one of six manufacturers turning out vials of the Salk vaccine.

It’s now believed that Cutter wasn’t following Salk’s instructions and failed to completely kill the poliovirus in the vaccine.

Locally, the vaccination effort restarted that September, and Greene County kids — all of them by then were in grades 2 and 3 — received their second shots.

The one-shot COVID-19 vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson experienced a similar halt this spring after reports of rare but serious blood clots in young women who received it (a rate of about seven per 1 million vaccinated women 18-49).

The pause on the J&J vaccine was lifted April 23, but the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the damage may already have been done — less than half the public now has confidence in the safety of the J&J shot.

That said, the CDC says the COVID-19 vaccines have been administered “under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S. history.”

It was obviously a much different era in the Facebook-free/cable news-absent world of 1955.

Columnist and broadcaster Walter Winchell’s inflammatory assertion that the Salk vaccine “may be a killer” was thus partially true given the mishap in production, but his was obviously a fringe voice in the ’50s. Polio cases in the U.S. plummeted from more than 45,000 on average to just 910 by 1962.

Ask Sandy King’s 93-year-old mother, Lennice Bauer, of Churdan, whether she had any worries about the polio vaccine and you’ll get a two-word answer.

“Heavens no,” Bauer said.

“We were all just tickled to death they had something that might help,” she added.

Thanks solely to vaccination, the U.S. has been free of polio since 1979, according to the CDC. Polio was deemed to be completely eliminated from the Western Hemisphere in 1994.

Whether COVID-19 will one day share polio’s fate is now anyone’s guess. The novel coronavirus has already been implicated in the deaths of more than 578,945 Americans its first year.

“The more this virus circulates,” Anglemyer said, “the more chances there are for variants that will potentially elude this vaccine.”

Julsen — who took the Moderna shot the first chance she got — is personally growing impatient.

“I want to do the family gatherings again,” she said. “I want a return to normalcy. This is the way we’re going to get there.”

It’s admittedly difficult for Lennice Bauer to understand why some people don’t want to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

“I know several adults who aren’t going to take the shot,” Bauer said. “I can’t believe it.”

King thinks the hesitancy surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine has to do with who has been most impacted by the disease.

While kids 11-17 have accounted for about 1.5 million COVID-19 cases between March 1, 2020, and April 30, 2021, theirs is generally a milder illness.

Polio, on the other hand, sealed kids inside iron lungs and left many permanently disabled.

“To them,” King said of many parents today, “it’s not going to happen to their child. Some people need to see how bad it is.”

Ironically, King said she knows some anti-vaxxers who jumped at a chance to get a COVID-19 vaccine — all because they saw a relative battle the illness.

At Medicap, pharmacists Anglemyer and Julsen can only hope that, locally, doctors are having conversations with their patients about getting a vaccine.

They’ve heard all the myths about the COVID-19 vaccine — that it contains a secret microchip; that it alters your DNA; that it causes infertility. The CDC says all of those are untrue.

“It went through all the steps every vaccine goes through,” Julsen said. “It has been studied.”

Anglemyer is quick to say that not everyone with vaccine hesitancy should be construed as “crazy.”

“They like to say, ‘We just don’t know enough about it yet,’” he said. “Three hundred million people have received it. How many more test subjects do you need?”

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