Even in the house of horrors that is vaccine-preventable illnesses, polio stands out as particularly terrifying. Before the rollout of the vaccine in the 1950s, the disease paralyzed or killed more than 500,000 people worldwide every year. The disease was especially catastrophic for children, some of whom were confined for years to wheelchairs or a mechanical breathing chamber known ominously as the iron lung. Older people remember being forbidden to play outside during summer outbreaks for fear that they would catch the disease.
The darker chapters of public health history do not seem to faze anti-vaccine activists, who have long claimed that measles, a catastrophic disease, is no big deal. Now, it’s polio’s turn to be downplayed.
Over the last few months, a handful of influential anti-vaccine activists have dabbled in polio denialism. In September, for example, Larry Cook, founder of the anti-vaccine group Stop Mandatory Vaccination, falsely claimed to his 137,000 followers on X that polio “was cured with high dose vitamin C” and that “the polio vaccine NEVER stopped polio. We’ve been lied to for decades and decades.”
Then, in October, Suzanne Humphries, a holistic medicine practitioner and anti-vaccine activist, appeared on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast. “The early injection caused more paralytic polio than it prevented,” she told Rogan. “And that’s the part that people don’t understand when they say, ‘What about polio?
Because there’s no more iron lungs, there’s no more crippling, there’s no more of these poor little kids walking around with their casts.’ Well, that’s not true because the iron lung is now called a ventilator.”
She went on to argue that “we still have polio that we had in 1953” because many of the cases back then weren’t technically polio but rather paralysis triggered by vaccines, tonsillectomies, and exposure to toxic substances like arsenic.
