Risks Worth Taking

I was in first grade when I lined up with most of the children in my school as part of mass testing of Jonas Salk’s new polio vaccine. My parents had explained the big word “placebo” to me, meaning that I would be getting a shot but it might not be the real vaccine.

Actually there were three shots, spaced out over a number of weeks. You can imagine how upset I was a year later to learn that the tests had been successful, but I had received the placebo and would need to have three more shots. “No fair!” was my seven-year-old reaction to that news.

I’m a little too young to remember beaches and swimming pools closing down and parents keeping their children home through long hot summers in order to prevent them from catching polio, but I did get a sense of how important my parents thought it was that we help test the new vaccine.

Over the last two years I have thought a lot about those days. I had no idea that such a mass trial was a new and somewhat controversial methodology. It turns out that my placebo shots were part of the early development of vaccine testing protocols which have become familiar over the intervening years. Those vaccine protocols have meant, among other things, that my children were vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella, and their children are also vaccinated against chicken pox. Each generation has been safer, and each generation of parents has had that much less anxiety to deal with in the midst of all the other difficulties of raising children.

It’s not that there aren’t risks to vaccines. Of course there are, some of them inherent In the statistical odds that sometimes even the best protections don’t cover all situations. Parents still worry about all the dangers to which children are exposed, including COVID and school shootings, which were not on my list or my parents’ list of dangers. We desperately want to keep our children safe, and at the same time we want our children to grow up to be able to live full and independent lives, which means they need to learn how to take care of themselves in a variety of circumstances and how to assess risks for themselves. It’s a balancing act, and we do our best not to err too much on the side of caution or the side of over-confidence.

Participating in the polio tests and then receiving the real vaccine taught me not only some new big words but some important lessons about avoiding terrible risks (paralysis, death) and taking reasonable risks, lessons which I have found useful throughout adulthood and now in a world filled with risks we didn’t dream of in the 1950s.