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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.

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.

The iron lung was emblematic of that terror, the second worst possible outcome of polio.

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.

Holyo had long since been eradicated in America, the iron lung was this sort of artifact of this kind of distant, fearful past.

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?

How did Paul's experience shape modern vaccine culture and how we think about infectious disease?

And how did the collective fixation on achieving a polio vaccine impact Americans perception of public health?

And really, what did we lose by not having that fear be a regular part of our lives?

When I finished the article and it was ultimately published, we were in the middle of lockdown.

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.

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.

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.

And I feel like in some ways that's almost precisely what we've done with COVID.

And then I wonder sort of what's going to happen next?

That complacency that we feel is a real recipe for disaster.

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The Man in the Iron Lung

by Linda Rodriguez McRuby,

read by Christopher Ragland, and produced by Esther O'Poco Jenny.

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