New Yorkers were soon standing for hours, often in chilly rain, outside public and private hospitals, clinics and police stations, waiting to get their inoculations. For them, vaccinations were nothing new. Many had served as soldiers in World War II; they had been vaccinated against a host of viruses and saw the inoculations as a matter of course. Moreover, today’s anti-vaccination movement did not exist.
Dr. Oshinsky, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Polio: An American Story,” offers yet another reason. “This was the height of polio in the United States,” he said. “People had a much better sense of the impact of infectious disease. They saw it all the time, and they were rightly fearful. But they were also optimistic that medical science could conquer this. In 1947, there was tremendous faith in the medical community, unlike today.”
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