I grew up in the dark ages. Children died from diseases like polio and measles. I remember attending a funeral for a young girl in my neighborhood who died of complications from measles. Another child died of complications from polio. A classmate was crippled by this disease. We saw images of children in “iron lungs”—large metal tubes they lived in to help them breathe after suffering polio. Measles could be a short childhood illness or it could kill or blind a child.

My parents were constantly worried about my brother or me catching one of these horrible sicknesses. We came back early from a vacation because a polio epidemic had suddenly broken out where we were planning to visit. During the summer, swimming pools required swimmers to get out of the water every hour and rest for ten minutes because overexertion might encourage the disease. Nobody complained about this restriction harming their civil rights.

Of course, we had immunizations against some diseases. Death and serious illness from small pox and typhoid no longer visited whole populations as they once had. My great aunt told of almost dying from typhoid, with a fever so high, she said, that her hair had fallen out.

Immunizations against these diseases were given each year in our public schools. The county nurse would make the rounds inoculating all students against the diseases for which we had vaccines.

When vaccines against polio came out, parents rushed their children to schools to be vaccinated—it was midsummer, as I remember—but schools opened for mass inoculation. Almost immediately, the fear of polio vanished in this country because almost every child had been vaccinated against it. It was a miracle.

If only, I remember thinking, the vaccine had come out a few months or a year earlier, my classmate’s life could have been saved.

With this history and these memories, I have a hard time understanding the massive resistence to vaccines. To me, science and vaccines and modern medicines are a gift God has given us with the power to create good for the world’s people.