4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2023
⏱️ 40 minutes
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0:00.0 | This is The Guardian. |
0:30.0 | I first became interested in Paul and his story after my mother-in-law, who is in her 80s, posted a video of him on Facebook in early 2019. |
0:42.0 | She remembered the anxiety of the polio years every human interaction was fraught with this kind of terror of something that no one could see until it was too late. |
0:54.0 | The iron lung was emblematic of that terror, the second worst possible outcome of polio. |
1:00.0 | And what struck me was that this was not an experience that I had ever had in my life, or really that I expected to have. |
1:08.0 | Holyo had long since been eradicated in America, the iron lung was this sort of artifact of this kind of distant, fearful past. |
1:17.0 | So what did it mean to be the living reminder of something that was in a lot of people's minds, not believe in a thing anymore? |
1:26.0 | How did Paul's experience shape modern vaccine culture and how we think about infectious disease? |
1:33.0 | And how did the collective fixation on achieving a polio vaccine impact Americans perception of public health? |
1:42.0 | And really, what did we lose by not having that fear be a regular part of our lives? |
1:49.0 | When I finished the article and it was ultimately published, we were in the middle of lockdown. |
1:55.0 | So it was in the middle of that where suddenly we were much more intimate with the kinds of things that had terrified people in America during the polio outbreaks. |
2:06.0 | I think now, I think the thing that I'm most struck by is how much in some ways we've forgotten even that and it wasn't that long ago. |
2:14.0 | What I found so compelling about Paul's story initially was that this was a very long period of time in America where entire summers were dominated by this fear and yet we sort of forgot it. |
2:30.0 | And I feel like in some ways that's almost precisely what we've done with COVID. |
2:35.0 | And then I wonder sort of what's going to happen next? |
2:38.0 | That complacency that we feel is a real recipe for disaster. |
2:48.0 | Welcome to the Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics, and new thinking. |
2:55.0 | For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to thegardin.com for a slash long read. |
3:03.0 | The Man in the Iron Lung |
3:06.0 | by Linda Rodriguez McRuby, |
3:08.0 | read by Christopher Ragland, and produced by Esther O'Poco Jenny. |
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