by JC Sullivan
In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a victim of the polio scourge, championed the cause of eliminating it. He signed into law the non-profit National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) to combat polio and to support his fellow-Americans who had been struck by it (one of the reasons his likeness appears on the American dime coin).
One of the President Roosevelt’s longtime close associates was D. Basil O’Connor, a native of Taunton, MA, led the way of the effort, which had been coined the March of Dimes by comedian Eddie Cantor. As its President, O’Connor, along with staffers Elaine Whitelaw and Charles Bynum, an African-American educator who recognized that polio care was also a civil rights issue, they cultivated volunteers nationwide, building the March of Dimes into a grass roots operation to fund and enable medical researchers to immediately respond to the virus. One grantee at the University of Pittsburgh was Dr. Jonas Salk. His work led to the creation of a vaccine that all but eliminated the threat of polio.
In 1954 I was one the 1.8 million students in the United States that participated in a national program to test the Salk Vaccine. We were living in the Buckeye Road area of Cleveland and dutifully reported to Audubon Junior High School to take the virus on a cube of sugar or as a shot in the arm. I don’t recall having to have a shot of the Salk vaccine the following year but I am told that many had to. The Salk vaccine reduced the number of polio cases from thousands who were affected to just a relatively few. His vaccine was licensed for use in April, 1955.
It was the effort of thousands of researchers working to discover how the virus functioned, and the millions of volunteers across the nation who were coordinated by the NFIP, which led to the effort to eliminate polio.
Now, in 2020, the Internet is providing a virtual outlet for opinions, facts and false news. It’s information overload. With COVID19 seeming to advance across our nation and the world it seems to this writer that now in April, 2020 an effort such as was the March of Dimes against polio should be already be in place to discover how his virus functions and thereby defeat it.
Source: A History of the March of Dimes the polio years.