On April 14, 1955, two days after a new polio vaccine was declared safe and effective, a young woman in Maine wrote to her grandmother that “spring has finally come.”
The woman, the mother of a toddler and a baby on the way, was thankful the snow was melting, felt blessed that the baby was healthy, and expressed hope that she might soon be born into a world transformed.
Over the previous three years alone, polio had sickened more than 160,000 children, killed more than 7,000, and destined hundreds of survivors to lifelong complications, including paralysis. The optimism was well-founded. The polio vaccine changed the world.
Cardinal & Pine reporter Michael McElroy says his wife found the letter while sorting through family keepsakes. It rings a lot of familiar bells in post-pandemic America.
As McElroy writes, medicine—the creation of it, the supply of it, the cost of it—matters a great deal in 2025. It’s at the heart of our new “Bad Medicine” series.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll report on the state’s health care system, both the crises and the triumphs. We’ll dive into the multi-front attack the Trump administration is waging on North Carolina, from looming cuts to Medicaid, to soaring Affordable Care Act (ACA) premiums, to the dismantling of federal health infrastructure and research funding, to the widespread disinformation about vaccines and other medical treatments.
Keep an eye on this newsletter for the latest from Bad Medicine.
