On behalf of my late friend Robert Harris, who lived his brief life in leg irons, I’d like to reach out now to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and shake him by his throat.
Kennedy would like to take us back to another age before life-saving vaccines, of iron lungs and leg braces, when parents worried about lifelong paralysis and early demise for their children.
Last week, Kennedy testified before members of the U.S. Congress and drew rage from Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee), one of many who pronounced himself appalled at Kennedy’s Neanderthal views of modern medicine.
“Despite having been a friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Cohen said, “as a polio survivor and post-polio syndrome victim, and after having watched Kennedy testify before the Senate Finance Committee, it is my duty on behalf of all polio victims past and present to ask him to resign or ask the president to remove him.
“RFK Jr. is a clear and present danger to every child and to the general health of the people of the United States. Questioning the efficacy of the polio vaccine, which was of course not available to those of us who had polio, endangers those for whom it might not be available in the future.”
In a day’s worth of verbal combat in which Kennedy ducked and weaved around his outlandish record on vaccines, many recalled remarks he made last year, claiming the polio vaccine caused cancers that “killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.”
He called the polio vaccine’s success “a mythology.”
By the time Kennedy testified last week, his views were widely known. A year ago, when his nomination as healthy secretary was first floated by Donald Trump, 75 Nobel Prize laureates sent a letter to the U.S. Senate.
“In addition to his lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health or administration,” they wrote, “Mr. Kennedy has been an opponent of many health-protecting and life-saving vaccines, such as those that prevent measles and polio; a critic of the well-established positive effects of fluoridation of drinking water; a promoter of conspiracy theories about remarkably successful treatments for AIDS and other diseases.”
When the Salk vaccine became available and was pronounced “80 to 90 percent effective” against the form of polio that caused paralysis, the New York Times reported, “Pots clanged, horns honked, and factory whistles blew around the country” in celebration.
That was in 1955. I met Robert Harris in 1952 when we were third graders at P.S. 20 in East Baltimore, just below North Avenue. Robert was born too soon for any vaccine protection. He wore leg braces so he could move about and pretend he was as carefree as any other seven-year-old.
What stays with me is a daily playground scene. There was Robert, trying impossibly to keep up with the other kids, lifting each leg gingerly before taking a step, hoping not to fall on his face so he could feel like a playmate and not a victim.
We had a game in which classmates were captured and locked up in a little triangular “cell” by a playground fence. While all others were running around, he was the guard at the cell. It meant he didn’t have to move around. And it meant he felt included. He could feel normal.
Normalcy was a lie to ease the pain, which was shared by children all over the world before the Salk vaccine was created. And now this Kennedy would risk taking all of us back to that time of iron lungs and leg braces and children in schoolyards hungry just to fit in.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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