Ayala: Polio survivor wonders why parents refuse to vaccinate their children
In 1953, Gilbert Sanchez winces as he receives a polio vaccine in San Antonio. Express-News file photoPolio hit its U.S. peak in the 1940s and 1950s, each year infecting thousands of people, most of them children.
In July, as COVID-19 continued to infect, sicken and kill people, polio re-emerged in an unvaccinated man in Rockland County, New York. The polio virus might have been present as early as April.“Why would you want to go through what I went through?” he asked. The latter know he walks with a limp but have no idea their grandfather had polio as a child, or that a cane helps compensate for an atrophied right leg and foot weakened by a disease he was diagnosed with at 6 months of age.
The brace attracted both attention and pity. He hated both. He desperately wanted to be seen as normal. He moved up the ranks of the now-shuttered U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, eventually becoming Harlingen’s district director.
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