'Got polio?' messaging underscores a vaccine campaign's success but creates false sense of security as memories of the disease fade in US

• Thanks, Science.” Messages like this are used in memes, posters, T-shirts and even some billboards to promote routine vaccinations.
• Phrasing that aims to encourage immunizations by highlighting their accomplishments implies that some diseases are no longer a threat.
• Moreover, a 2020 poll had found that 84% of adults viewed vaccinating children as important, a 10% decline from 2001.
• A shift in focus to immunization in developing countries has further lulled Americans into a false sense of security.

Campaigning against a devastating disease

• Before vaccines, polio – called infantile paralysis or poliomyelitis – was the most feared childhood disease in the U.S.
• Frequently affecting elementary school kids, the disease sometimes presented like a cold or flu – fever, sore throat and headache.
• Only time could reveal whether the paralysis was permanent or would recede, sometimes to return decades later as Post-Polio Syndrome.
• High schoolers performed polio-themed plays, putting the disease itself on trial in “The People vs. Polio.” People passed around collection boxes at movie theaters and other public gatherings.

From public enemy No. 1 to success story

• Over the next decade, the NFIP shifted its focus to widespread immunization, again using both mass media and local campaigns.
• The repeated declaration of what polio vaccines could and were accomplishing was strategically effective in persuading more people to get their shots.
• The American public of the 1960s and 1970s had lived through repeated polio epidemics and knew both the fear of contracting the disease and its visible aftereffects.
• Public health rhetoric that focused on this vaccine success story worked around the world in the late 1980s and 1990s.
• A reminder for the American public about this still dangerous disease can help ensure that “Got Polio?” does not become a serious question.