polio vaccine

Countries in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia are counting more cases of vaccine-derived polio. One reason for this, say experts, is that vaccination efforts have lapsed during the pandemic.

The pandemic has slowed efforts to eradicate the contagious disease. Yet the country's polio effort offers insights on the launch of its coronavirus vaccine campaign.

The country had nearly annihilated polio before conspiracy theories gave the disease room to spread. An army of health workers is set to give coronavirus vaccines too — if Pakistanis will take them.

In 1957, residents of the southwestern town Protection set an example by being the first in the U.S. to be fully inoculated against polio. Now locals are divided on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.

In the 1950s, as Dr. Jonas Salk and virologist Albert Sabin worked to create a vaccine to prevent infantile paralysis, the threat from polio was already long familiar to Americans.

The children and preteens of the U.S. polio epidemic of the 1940s and '50s are once again in a high-risk group, this time for coronavirus. They recall their experiences and the parallels to today.