Dr. Salk redux?

Flip on the blinker and hit the brakes. That corner we’ve been hearing about for the last couple of months seems to be coming up.

Oh, it’s so good to get good news – especially when it’s the real thing, not somebody’s want-it-to-be, wish-it-could-be-so-I’m-gonna-say-it-is snake oil and fairy dust. This is the product of real science -- of labs and experiments and double-blind tests – and now we have two -- yup, two – experimentally effective vaccines against COVID-19 coming soon to a clinic or pharmacy near you.

My first medical memory goes back to when I must have been about three-years-old, that would be about 1955. I remember Mom taking me into a little room at the Mayo Clinic and holding her squirming son reasonably still while a scary white-clad apparition jabbed my arm with what seemed to be an awfully long needle. I remember them promising me that that “polio shot” was gonna keep me from getting sick, but all I thought of was my sore arm. And, after I ate something I shouldn’t have and got the runs a few days later I remembered that promise and have harbored a certain skepticism ever since.

Now that injection may not have protected me from a surfeit of jelly beans, but I did go on to live a life untroubled by paralytic poliomyelitis, a member of the first generation in human history so blessed. From the introduction of the Salk vaccine in 1955 until now, polio – which reached epidemic proportions in the summers prior to its introduction -- has been all but eradicated world-wide.

For the second time in my lifetime, a vaccine is promising to put the kibosh on an epidemic. How lucky can one man get?

Well, in this case, it depends a lot on the rest of you.

Those vaccines – both tested to stop better than 9 out of 10 possible infections – are still in the lab. You, my friends, are out in the streets. Or hanging out in bars. Wandering the aisles at Wally-World, munching burgers with your buddies watching the Packers in your brother-in-law’s basement. You’re going to work. Going to church. Going somewhere to do something and all the while sucking in God’s good air and spewing it back out for all the world to share.

And that’s where all the recent good news gets overshadowed by the bad. More and more that air we share is getting filled with itty-bitty virus-y particles. We suck ‘em in, we get sick. Some of us end up in the hospital. Some of us die. All because of those unseeable particles hanging in the air we have to breathe as we go about doing the things we have to do.

That’s the bad news. But every cloud has a silver lining, even an infections viral cloud. The simple fact is, since we put that virus into the air and we can also keep it out.

 And that we can do by simply wearing masks. For all the ballyhoo about a vaccine that we might be able to get six months from now – if we’re lucky – if everybody wore a mask and kept that well-known six-feet apart we’d have a reduction in the viral transmission rate equal to the best hoped for vaccine – without using a single needle.

The old Pogo comic strip had it right – when it comes to this virus, we have seen the enemy and he is us. To put it plain, all that’s keeping our hospitals full and morgues overflowing is our stupidity and stubbornness. Your rights? Let me rephrase the old saw about your right to swing your fist ending where my nose begins – your right to spew your infected snot into the air ends when the rest of us have to breathe it in.

Stay home. Mask up. Stay well.

We can do it. That’s the real good news.