Kipp’s aunt contracted polio in the infamous Cutter Incident. But her family sees it as a story about the ability of science to self-correct as it pushes toward cures for horrible diseases.

The search to find a vaccine to prevent polio took many years and countless experiments before the disease was eventually eradicated in the United States.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is telling senators considering his nomination to lead the government’s health agencies he merely wants transparency about vaccines.

In its original form, the virus survives in just two countries. But a type linked to an oral vaccine used in other nations has already turned up in the West.

The search to find a vaccine to prevent polio took many years and countless experiments before the disease was eventually eradicated in the United States.

Then there’s this: Aaron Siri, Kennedy’s lawyer and the person helping him pick top federal health officials, according to The New York Times, has petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the polio vaccine used in this country as well as those for 13 other infectious diseases.

I remember the day I received the vaccine. My mother took me to the local high school, where we joined a long waiting line. It was a warm day, and we stood outside. My mother was wearing a summer dress, and the skirt blew against her legs. I remember how happy she was.

There are an estimated 300,000 polio survivors in the United States. For some, the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary is reviving their painful memories.

Senators should not be fooled by Kennedy’s posturing and should demand straight answers from him, because our children’s health depends on it.

Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn’t.

Can it be that what took years of research to create be undone by non-medical officials who have never stepped into a research laboratory?

A press release issued today from the NEOC said the Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at Islamabad’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) confirmed the first wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) case of 2025. “The onset of the case was on January 7,” the press release said, adding that DI Khan reported 11 polio cases in 2024.