Baby, It’s Me, Polio, and I’ve Missed You

Can I be vulnerable with you for a second? I always believed we’d get back together.

Smallpox thought I was nuts. He kept telling me, “You’re delusional, bro.”

Rinderpest was similarly down about it. “They literally eradicated you.” I’m like, maybe look in the mirror when you say shit like that? Because I might be down, but I am not out.

And every time I talked about my comeback, Dracunculiasis rolled her eyes at me. “They all but wiped you out, man. It was one of the great successes of twentieth-century medicine.”

That was hard to hear. But I held on. I believe in manifesting. And I know you: You’re always saying that you’re over stuff that you aren’t REALLY over. You revive every franchise, and you reboot all your television shows. You “quit” social media. Look at high-rise jeans. And also low-rise jeans. Pretty much every rise of jeans. You count them out, and then—bam—just when you’ve finally cleaned them out of your closet, they’re back in fashion again. That’s why, despite everything, I’ve stayed optimistic.

I know, I know, “remember when” is the lowest form of conversation. But I can’t let you forget what it was like when we did everything together. I was the king of your world. I hit 1916 like a goddamn wrecking ball. More than 21,000 permanently disabling cases of me and more than 6,000 deaths, mostly children. By 1952, I was paralyzing and killing people left, right, and center. Rich, poor, presidential: it didn’t matter. Little ones under five were my specialty. What can I say? I love kids. I’m like the Matt Gaetz of infectious disease.

You were so obsessed with me. The only thing you feared more was nuclear war. I was all you thought about. You shut down your swimming pools and beaches; you avoided big crowds, movie theaters, and sporting events. You put your sick children in those awful, giant machines—iron lungs—because I’d paralyzed their muscles, and they couldn’t breathe. You did it all for me. Call me a dreamer, but I really thought it could be like that forever.

Of course, there were threats to our future. Salk in ’55. Sabin in ’61. Those nerds really did a number on me. Then in 1988, you launched a global initiative to wipe me from the face of the earth. I thought: Yeah, good luck with that.

But you surprised me. At my height, in 1952, I infected nearly 60,000 children, paralyzing thousands and killing more than 3,000. By 1979, I was nowhere to be found in the entire United States, and by 2015, I was only naturally occurring in two countries.

Not gonna lie; I felt pretty defeated.

And then COVID hit, and I was like, fuuuuuuck.

As if I needed another nail in my coffin. I knew that once people who were too young to remember when I ruled the streets had lived experience with a global pandemic and witnessed firsthand both the toll of a brutal, deadly disease and the miraculous preventative work that a vaccine could do—that would be game over for me.

But I forgot something important. Something really powerful and kind of beautiful: So many of you—a critical mass of you, possibly a majority of you—are really fucking stupid. And I’ve always loved that about you!

Remember before the polio vaccine how some of you were blaming my spread on Italians? That was the real you. That whole thing where you trusted scientists and listened to their expert counsel? Sweetheart, you and I both know that was just a phase. Deep down, you’re a sucker for misinformation, which is being pummeled into your brain at an alarming rate via a deliberately destabilizing media ecosystem operated by megalomaniacal carnival barkers and tech billionaires who truly do not care if any other person on this planet lives or dies. That’s what makes you who you are, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So, I never gave up on you. I could see you were sending me little hints that you missed our time together: when you subscribed to Goop and started liking all those social media posts that were “just asking questions” about vaccines, when you elected Trump the first time, and then also that second time. You really gave me hope.

Now, with that brain-wormed Kennedy at the top of the FDA, nothing is stopping us from reuniting. I’ve missed you, okay? I’m not too proud to admit it. But I know that you know we’re endgame, baby. Once you take me back, I’ll never let you go. We’re in it for the long haul. Till death do us part.