Hey Skipper
I don’t remember my father ever speaking with me about my eleven days as a political prisoner in Chile’s infamous Estadio Nacional or that I had been told that “in fifteen minutes” I would be put “in front of a firing squad.”
It was 1973. Psychology wasn’t what it is today. I am certain that my parents had been cautioned “Don’t talk to him about what happened. It might retraumatize him.”
Daddy was like so many of men of his World War II era. There was emotion there. It just wasn’t expressed. We knew that he was proud of us. His bosses and coworkers, Knights of Columbus friends and others would often greet us with “Your father is so proud of you. All of you.”
There was one moment.
Not really memory. Rather, an absolute awareness and certainty that it happened. (My sister Colleen has verified this story.)
My father was a dancer. Still in the ‘60s and 70’s replicating the moves he used while courting our mother. And he was proud – perhaps more than his abilities merited – of his dancing “moves.”
[No bragging. In high school my date and I won the “cha-cha” contest against an auditorium of young Cuban couples and there are rumors that I taught Patrick Swayze and John Travolta everything they ever learned about dirty dancing. (To use a professional psychologist/counselor dodge, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”)]
Having already served on a battleship in the Pacific (his typing skills earned him the post of “admiral’s talker” – probably a Navy term for secretary), he was assigned to Miami Beach and the gasoline rationing coupon office. Even before coming stateside, he wrote and proposed to our mother; they were married in Miami’s oldest Catholic church and, almost two years later (1945), my father walked into the “old Navy hospital” at the southern tip of Miami Beach (Today, hardly anyone even knows it was there.) and greeted his firstborn: “Hey Skipper!” Thus, the name by which I’m known to the world. (“Skipper” is Navy slang for a ship’s captain and I was to be the “captain of the family ship.”)
Then Daddy directed/ordered the nurse “Take off those covers. I want to see all of him.”
It’s probable that the pain of that moment is the reason Daddy only told me the story once.
At birth, my legs were so deformed – God alone knows why – that the doctors told my parents I would probably never run and dancing was out of the question. Much of my first year would be spent in leg casts with some kind of rods keeping them in place. Post-cast: Constant massaging and stretching.
But there was worse news.
For some time the docs feared I had polio.
While non-paralytic poliomyelitis is more common and only causes mild flu-like symptoms and the majority of people infected never develop symptoms, the virus can multiply in the intestines and spread to the nervous system, leading to sepsis, which can cause spinal or respiratory paralysis. For those paralyzed, their lives are significantly changed by the disease and the stigmas surrounding people with physical disabilities. Polio mainly affects children under five years old. While there is an effective vaccine, there is no known cure. Patients’ lives were “saved” by “iron lungs” – massive, metal contraptions that “breathed” for them.
Polio has affected mankind throughout history and epidemics were common in the first decades of the 20th Century. The first major American epidemic was in Vermont in the summer of 1894 and, by the time I was born and tentatively diagnosed, tens of thousands of Americans were diagnosed with polio each year. Many died. Fifty-eight thousand new cases of polio were diagnosed and more than 3,000 died from the disease in 1952 – an epidemic year.
On March 26, 1953, researcher Dr. Jonas Salk announced that he had successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis – “infantile paralysis.”
Why?
Beyond the fact that he was a medical researcher and every year thousands of Americans were dying from polio…
Because in 1921, while vacationing at his summer home on Campobello Island (New Brunswick, Canada), a thirty-nine-year-old man contacted polio that left his legs permanently paralyzed. In 1938, five years after entering the White House, President Franklin Roosevelt helped create the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later renamed the March of Dimes Foundation, and spearheaded the drive that became the primary funding source for Dr. Salk’s vaccine trials.
In 1954, Dr. Salk began clinical trials – the vaccine and a placebo – on 1.3 American schoolchildren. Mishaps in a laboratory producing the vaccines - 200,000 people in mid-Western and Western states were injected with a defective vaccine, l200 children were left paralyzed and ten died – temporarily delayed the approval of the new vaccine.
The new (and safe) vaccine was first widely available in 1957 and researcher Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine became available in 1962. Today, polio has essentially be eliminated in the United States.
Paralytic polio cases in the US peaked in 1952, seven years after my parents finally exhaled, and essentially disappeared worldwide by the late 1990s; the last polio-related death was reported in Mozambique in 2021.
Cheshire Home for Handicapped Childre, Freetown, Sierra Leone
Sabin’s oral polio vaccine (OPV) has almost completely – almost - eliminated polio virus worldwide. In under-vaccinated areas the weakened virus originally contained in OPV can begin to circulate and, if this happens for a long enough period, it may genetically revert to a “strong” virus capable of causing paralysis – circulating vaccine deprived polioviruses (cVCPVs). In December 2024, 59 cases of “Wild Poliovirus Type 1 (WPV1) were reported in Pakistan and 190 cases of Circulating Vaccine-Deprived Poliovirus (cVDPV) have been reported in Nigeria, Cameroon, Afghanistan, Indonesia and other countries.
On October 3, 2024 the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health reported that in August a 10-month-old boy was diagnosed with polio in Gaza – the first in twenty-five years. The report noted that this may be an indicator of a return – at least in Gaza – of the genetically altered “wild-type” virus capable of causing paralysis.
The “Polio in Gaza: Experts explain the outbreak and the public health response” Harvard report was a collection of excerpts from the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights convened under Harvard’s Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights
Mary Bassett, director of the FSXB Center for Health and Human Rights noted:
“In July of 2022, I was the New York State health commissioner when a young adult with paralysis was diagnosed with polio.
“While poliovirus was eliminated from the United States in 1979, the disease did continue to be diagnosed from time to time in people who had been infected outside the U.S. This case was different because the patient - who was unvaccinated - had been infected by a vaccine-derived poliovirus circulating within the U.S. We believe that low vaccination rates in some U.S. communities gave the virus a foothold.
“After the diagnosis, there was tremendous shock in New York and around the country. But there should be no shock to see polio in Gaza today. The region is a perfect storm for a polio outbreak that was completely preventable and poses a threat to the whole region, especially for the under-vaccinated and unvaccinated.”
Gaza polio immunization program, September 2024
Measles isn’t just a “childhood disease.” It is a potentially serious, even deadly, disease with complications ranging from encephalitis – brain swelling that can cause convulsions, deafness, or intellectual disabilities – to pneumonia that causes childhood deaths, blindness and – in women – premature birth or low birth weights of their babies.
Mumps can result in inflammation of the salivary glands, testicles, ovaries, breast tissue, and the brain and spinal cord.
Congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) can occur when a pregnant woman is infected with rubella and as many as ninety percent of babies born to women infected with rubella in pregnancy face potentially lifelong disabilities, including hearing impairments, heart defects, and developmental delays.
On November 14, 2024, the World Health Organization reported:
“Worldwide, there were an estimated 10.3 million cases of measles in 2023, a 20% increase from 2022, according to new estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Inadequate immunization coverage globally is driving the surge in cases.
“Measles is preventable with two doses of measles vaccine; yet more than 22 million children missed their first dose of measles vaccine in 2023…
“Coverage of 95% or greater of two doses of measles vaccine is needed in each country and community to prevent outbreaks and protect populations from one of the world’s most contagious human viruses.
“Measles vaccine has saved more lives than any other vaccine in the past 50 years,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “To save even more lives and stop this deadly virus from harming the most vulnerable, we must invest in immunization for every person, no matter where they live.”
Gaza immunization program, September 2024
On December 6, 2024, the U.S. Center for Disease Control reported:
“As of December 5, 2024, a total of 283 measles cases were reported by 32 [U.S. states]…
“There have been 16 outbreaks (defined as 3 or more related cases) reported in 2024, and 70% of cases (198 of 283) are outbreak-associated. For comparison, 4 outbreaks were reported during 2023 and 49% of cases (29 of 59) were outbreak-associated.
“However, vaccination coverage among U.S. kindergartners has decreased from 95.2% during the 2019–2020 school year to 92.7% in the 2023–2024 school year, leaving approximately 280,000 kindergartners at risk during the 2023–2024 school year.”
In August 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and after the release of COVID-19 vaccines, Pope Francis urged people worldwide to get vaccinated, calling it “an act of love… Thanks to God’s grace and to the work of many, we now have vaccines to protect us from COVID-19.” The vaccines “bring hope to end the pandemic, but only if they are available to all and if we collaborate with one another,” Pope Francis said.
The pope noted that social and political love is built up through “small, individual gestures capable of transforming and improving societies… Getting vaccinated is a simple yet profound way to care for one another, especially the most vulnerable… Each one of us can make his or her own small gesture of love… No matter how small, love is always grand. Small gestures for a better future.”
Gaza immunization program, September 2024
Pope Francis wasn’t speaking only of the COVID-19 vaccines. He was speaking to the world – to American parents, to vaccine deniers and American politicians who have appropriated unscientific and science-denying rhetoric to their own ambitions.
In March 2022, the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales echoed Pope Francis in a statement that applies equally to all, including anti-vaxxers:
“The Catholic Church strongly supports vaccination and regards Catholics as having a prima facie duty to be vaccinated, not only for the sake of their own health but also out of solidarity with others, especially the most vulnerable. We believe that there is a moral obligation to guarantee the vaccination coverage necessary for the safety of others.”
Some Catholics and people of other faiths objected to the use of COVID-19 vaccines derived from the cell lines of aborted fetuses in research in the 1950s. In December 2021, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith decreed “it is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process.”
The document also noted:
“In any case, from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one's own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed. Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent. In particular, they must avoid any risk to the health of those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons, and who are the most vulnerable.” [Emphasis in the original document.]
Health care worker marks a child’s finger indicating she has been vaccinated
EDITORS’ PERSONAL NOTE:
To the vaccine “skeptics” and those who spread such skepticism, to those who are spreading lies about the efficacy of vaccines and causing others to avoid and refuse vaccinations, to those who are using the issue of “vaccine safety” for their personal and political gain:
We will pray for you.
We will pray for your families.
May God save you from the pain, the anguish, the fear, and the
desperation of my father when he told a Navy nurse “Take off
those covers. I want to see all of him.”
May no child of yours – may no child - ever die because of your lies.
And should a child – any child – die because of those lies, may the
Good Lord, one day in Eternity, wash that blood from your hands.