Drinking a beer for her, she went to the high school very close by. I'm far too young to remember polio but still remember my grandparents talking about it. They had died of Covid-19 before her.
Something to remember by her is that the determination to live is something that keeps us going.
Before the covid vaccination was available, I read that being recently vaccinated for polio reduces the covid risk by 5% or so. I thought what the heck, and was re-vaccinated for polio.
I went down the list and got re-vaccinated for the usual set of childhood vaccines, as their efficacy fades over time.
Her optimism and creativity to overcome the disability and live her life is powerfully inspirational.
I wish I could apply that optimism to my perception of a societal shift away from disability accomodations and the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy... Enabling parents to foster unvaccinated children is a guarantee that we'll get a resurgence of this type of disease.
I recommend everyone educate themselves on our immune system:
the book "Immune" (ISBN: 1529360684) introduces the vast complexity in a very approachable manner. Also the podcasts through MicrobeTV by Vincent Racaniello are excellent.
Read up on herd immunity. The problem isn't specifically 'foreigners' but the general question of whether enough people are vaccinated to prevent the disease from roaring back when it inevitably - it is not possible to stop people from bringing diseases into the country - reoccurs.
Because your entire premise here sort of betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept?
So we stop vaccinating people here, and require everyone that enters be vaccinated. Problem solved!
Except not really, because people here travel to foreign places. So also everyone that _leaves_ here needs to be vaccinated as well. But that's do-able.
Except, and here's the part where "herd immunity" is important: Being vaccinated doesn't prevent contracting the disease 100% of the time. The reason vaccines are effective isn't "you can never get the disease", it's because "if you get it, it can't spread to enough people to sustain itself into an outbreak".
If you require people traveling into or out of the country to be vaccinated and stop vaccinating at home, you're going to have someone bring polio back fairly quickly. The vaccine is not 100% effective, and polio is asymptomatic in about 75% of cases so many carriers wouldn't even know they have it.
In a vaccinated population, that's not a problem. The effective reproduction rate is <1. For every person infected, less than one other will contract it. It does out quickly.
In your unvaccinated population, the R0 is 5-7. For every person infected, five to seven others will be infected. The growth will explode quickly and given the rate of asymptomatic carriers there's no chance you're going to contain it.
(Also have you ever watched any zombie virus/fungus/etc show? Even if the vaccine is 100% effective, do you really want to hang the health of the whole country on nobody ever messing up vaccine administration, nobody lying, nobody faking paperwork, etc?)
So everyone has to be vaccinated anyway, and if they're all vaccinated anyway the risk of letting a potential carrier in is... pretty near nil in the grand scheme of things.
Your options are:
* Never let anyone in or out. (But honestly, it'll still probably get in. See: lying.)
* Eradicated the disease globally. We can do it, but less likely to happen now with USAID shut down.
* Vaccinate at home so when the disease gets in the country it doesn't spread.
Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk.
The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of it will not cause paralysis, it can and occasionally does mutate back into a pathogenic variant.
So we're sort of maintaining a reservoir of polio, really.
Well, "can" is debatable. The only one we've effectively eradicated is smallpox and that was almost 50 years ago. Of course we couldn't actually eradicate it, though, and kept samples for "research purposes".
Something to remember by her is that the determination to live is something that keeps us going.
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