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A meme that has recently been crossing my tumblr dash has people recounting their first memories of historical events that took place in their lifetimes. One of my first memories of a nationally significant event is the distribution of Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine.

Sabin’s vaccine was provided community-wide beginning in the early 1960s. I have a vivid recollection of lining up with my family in the gymnasium at Deep Creek High School* to receive my first dose, administered as a magenta drop of medicine on a sugar cube. There are details that stick in memory, and some that I can only reconstruct. My mother attended Deep Creek High, and I know we stopped in the school hallway to pick out my mother’s face from a photo of her graduating class. I’m sure that any of the public health nurses present were wearing crisp white caps and uniforms. A detail I would not have noticed—because it would have been entirely unremarkable to me in those days—is that there were surely no African Americans present. These were still the days of Jim Crow apartheid in Virginia, and any black citizens would have received vaccines at the community’s all-black school.

At the time I was too young to be aware of the controversy surrounding U.S. acceptance of Sabin’s attenuated live polio vaccine as an alternative to Jonas Salk’s “killed virus” inoculations. Sabin wasn’t helped by his Russian ancestry, though his successful vaccine trials in Russia eventually made the case scientifically. The fact that the controversy was settled scientifically, with patient evidence gathering and thoughtful review sets it apart from the modern methodology—popular in some circles—of relying on anecdotes or uninformed presidential hunches to make medical decisions. I was astonished today to read that almost 30 percent of Americans believe (operative word) that the current coronavirus scourge was concocted in a lab somewhere, and released on the world either deliberately or accidentally. I’m not sure of the causes of this loony credulousness, except that many people are lazy thinkers, and real leaders who embrace science and an evidence-based worldview are in short supply. I wonder how many will reject a life-saving vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 once it is available, simply because one good conspiracy theory deserves another.

I trust science. I’m ready for my sugar cube.

The photo above is adapted from a 1960s public health advertising campaign in Ohio, urging citizens to get a complete course of polio vaccine treatments. I obtained it from the digital collections of www.ohiomemory.org.

*The village of Deep Creek is part of Chesapeake, Virginia, though it was still Norfolk County when I got my vaccine.