Vaccines Then and Now

As of early February 2021, the news is full of stories about vaccines against COVID-19, the pandemic that hit the United States early in 2020. For almost a year now, we have restricted our activities on almost every front. Working from home. Limited church services. No restaurants. Buying as much as possible online. We are all tired of the pandemic, and most of us want the vaccine sooner rather than later.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood vaccines. As an infant, I received the usual dosages at the usual times of vaccines that were available in the late 1950s. My earliest memories of shots are of crying. My tears and fears began even before I saw the needle—as soon as the nurse mentioned “shot,” I wailed.

I have a vaccination record showing all the vaccines I received from my birth until I graduated from high school. My pediatrician’s nurse filled it out for me when I went off to college, so I would have a record of my vaccination history. It has a picture of the Gerber baby of the era, which was too juvenile for me even at age 17. Nevertheless, for a while into my adulthood, I kept it up to date.

As this record reveals, I didn’t have to have too many shots after infancy because when I was a kid, there were no vaccines against chickenpox, measles, or mumps. Most people I knew just suffered through those diseases. I had chickenpox in the first grade and mumps as a ninth grader. I’ve never been sure if I had the measles, and at some point in high school I received the new measles vaccine. By that age, I steeled myself and did not cry.

The childhood experience I had that was most similar to today’s waiting for the COVID-19 vaccine was the polio oral vaccine I received in 1963, when I was seven years old. Like today’s mass vaccination sites for the COVID-19 shots, our whole community lined up to receive the new Sabin oral polio vaccine.

I lived in the town of Richland, Washington, a town of about 25,000 people. Obviously, not every citizen received the shot on the same day, but it was a community-wide event. I went with my parents and younger brother, and we all got our doses at the same time.

I was born in 1956, after the huge polio epidemics of the early 1950s, and as a child I didn’t know anyone who had had polio. As an adult, I met people a few years older than me who did have polio as a child, but I had no personal experience with polio as a kid.

My husband, who is a few years older than I am, remembers his parents keeping him away from his community swimming pool as a child, out of fear of exposing him to polio.
But even though I didn’t know anyone with polio as a kid, I knew it was a dreadful disease. I’d seen pictures of children in iron lungs and with braces on their legs. I knew about the March for Dimes and Jerry Lewis’s kids.

So, though I usually dreaded vaccines, I knew it was important to get this one.

My parents took my brother and me on the appointed day, and we lined up for the vaccine. There were masses of people at the government building where the vaccine was given. The Tri-City Herald newspaper on May 7, 1962, reported that most people showed up for the vaccine event the day before in their Sunday best.

I can’t be certain this was the date when we were vaccinated, but I do remember my mother dressing my brother and me up. May 6, 1962, was a Sunday, so it’s possible we even went for our shots after church. But I don’t remember the man in the skin-diver’s flippers and goggles that the newspaper article mentioned.

We filed into a long line and waited our turn. A woman in regular street clothes took our names and address, then we filed into another line. Nurses in white uniforms with starched caps handed out little vials and told us to drink.

I was afraid it would taste like medicine and I would gag on it. But it was sweet and syrupy. I wanted more. And I wished all vaccines were given in liquid form, instead of as nasty shots.

Unfortunately, that polio vaccine was the only liquid vaccine I ever received.

Many years later, when I was in law school, the first flu vaccine became available. I wasn’t keen to get it, but I also didn’t want my studies interrupted by the flu. So I went to the campus clinic and got the shot. And then had fever and chills for the next couple of days. I continued to go to class, but I was miserable.

I didn’t get another flu shot for decades. But around the year 2000, I decided I was being stupid and began to get them annually. It’s now a sign of the changing seasons—autumn comes, and I go to the pharmacy for my shot. I still get fever and chills some years, but I figure a day of misery is better than a week or so of the flu.

This year, I eagerly await my COVID-19 vaccine. Unfortunately, I won’t rise to the top of the queue for a few more months. I only wish it were a tasty liquid instead of a beastly shot.

Do you plan to get the COVID vaccine when you can? Or have you been lucky enough to receive the shot(s) already?