Before the birth of our first child and prior to starting my research on vaccines, this is about how much I thought I knew about polio and the polio vaccine:

1. Polio was a really big problem before the vaccine.
2. Lots of people were paralyzed from polio before the vaccine and many died.
3. After the vaccine everyone was saved from polio! The end.

It’s not quite that simple though. And I think it’s so important for parents evaluating this vaccine to know the big picture around the rise of polio and all of the factors going on at the time just before and after its peak.

The process of writing this post about polio and the polio vaccine was incredibly intense. At times I just wanted to give up this entire series on vaccines because research on polio was difficult and puzzling. Whereas my other posts on vaccines took a few weeks of compilation and research, this post took months. I’m a huge proponent of “doing hard things”, but when it comes to the history and science and statistics of polio, there is just SO MUCH.

So much history, so much varying opinion, so much politics, and so much FEAR. It’s taken a lot of time to detangle the story and break it down to you guys in a way I think makes sense and stays factual.

To complicate the story even more, just as I was about to wrap up my research on this post, a bombshell was dropped on everything I thought I believed about polio. I found out that my own DAD had polio when he was a toddler. I’m not sure how this never came up in conversation, seeing how big of a deal it is in our culture. But my family never mentioned it.

Last night I had an excellent talk with my 93-year-old grandmother about what it was like going through a polio diagnosis with her child. I knew I had to talk it through with her before I published this post, and what she said cemented my confidence in my decision about polio vaccination even more.

This is Part 2 in the series on how we made the decision about vaccines for our family. You can find Part 1 here and I strongly recommend reading it to get our family’s backstory before reading on. 😀

If you read my last post then you know that after months of research and amidst my healing from cancer while pregnant, we decided to delay vaccination for our daughter at birth. We had a lot on our plate and did not feel comfortable making such a big decision that we couldn’t reverse. When we decided this we weren’t necessarily sure HOW LONG we would delay but knew we weren’t comfortable with either decision yet.

I left off in my last post with our decision to delay vaccination at birth. So let’s pick up right there.