Daily Herald opinion: Crazy comes to health: Sadly, the polarized insanity of our politics has now spread onto our doctors' doorsteps

Young people today no doubt are out of touch with the fear of polio that gripped the parents of today's old-timers.

It was a real dread, a constant threat that once shuttered swimming pools and movie houses and altered lives.

“Polio was a plague,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes wrote. “One day you had a headache and an hour later, you were paralyzed. How far the virus crept up your spine determined whether you could walk afterward or even breathe. Parents waited fearfully every summer to see if it would strike.”

In 1952, poliomyelitis infected 57,628 Americans, most of them children; permanently paralyzed 21,269; and killed 3,145. It was the worst of what had become an annual toll. Almost everyone 75 and older today was acquainted at some point with a polio victim. It's hard to forget the leg braces in the school hall.

And then came the Jonas Salk vaccine in 1955 and the Albert Sabin oral vaccine in 1961.

People did not just line up for the vaccines. They celebrated them. Salk and Sabin were heroes.

Polio all but disappeared.

It is not the only dreaded disease that vaccines have eradicated or at least largely controlled. Smallpox, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, diphtheria, mumps. For the most part, no more. Influenza, shingles, even pneumonia, greatly managed because of vaccines. Millions of lives saved because of the miraculous COVID vaccines; the economy saved by them, our lifestyles saved by them.

And yet, what is our response as a larger community?

Last week, the Florida surgeon general announced he would be eliminating vaccine mandates, including those at public schools that have led to herd immunity. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. engaged in a boisterous exchange with senators while defending recent shake-ups at the Centers for Disease Control, supporting Operation Warp Speed on the one hand for putting America back to work but refusing to say that it saved lives. Several leaders at the CDC have departed. More than 1,000 current and former Health and Human Services employees have signed a letter calling for Kennedy's resignation. The public's trust in the safety of vaccines is lower than it ever has been.

Instead of celebrating these miracles of modern science, we are politicizing them.

Yes, there are risks to be balanced with any vaccine, just as there are with any medication. But we ought to have some level-headedness when the disease outweighs any remote risk, we ought to understand that community health matters.

Unfortunately, it probably should come as no surprise. The polarization of our era has spread to almost every sector of American life. We are at each other's throats over the courts, the news media, entertainment, schools and universities, law enforcement, immigration, climate and the environment, everywhere and everything. The culture is at war over facts and expertise. So, politicizing health care, skepticism over medical science and expertise, apparently was inevitable.

Certainly, it became so when President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans put a fringe-theory gadfly in charge of our national health. Why that appointment, it is forever hard to imagine, even when pushing a spirit of disruption.

This is not political theater. It's not infotainment for partisan cable news. It should not be a matter for each side to score political points.

Lives and quality of lives are at stake.

Can't we all come together on that?

Oh, if only there were a vaccine for this dreaded polarization.