V for Vaccinated

A little less than a decade ago, on one of my first visits to Joel Village, a staff member brought me to the Phiri home. It was located pretty close to the school, and I met Marizani, and his family outside of their home. Marizani made these amazing soccer balls for younger boys in the village. They would collect trash and bring it to him, and he would create these dense soccer balls tied together with trash, plastic bags, and elastic bands. We bought a few from Marizani and chatted with him a bit. He wasn’t able to walk and I learned on that first visit that he had been living with polio his whole life, and was making soccer balls to make a little bit of money and pass his time.

At the time, Marizani was the first person I had met in my lifetime who had polio. Polio had largely been eradicated in North America when I was growing up and when I met Marizani, I reflected on the critical importance of vaccines, and how many lives have been saved since the first vaccine was developed – not just lives from polio, but from measles, mumps, rubella, rotavirus, PCV, chicken pox, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough… the list continues. I felt grateful in that moment, and I followed the fight to eradicate polio closely thereafter.

In 1988, the 41st World Health Assembly adopted a resolution to eradicate polio worldwide. Polio cases have decreased by over 99% since then. More than 13 million people are able to walk today, who would have otherwise been paralyzed. An estimated 1.5 million childhood deaths have been prevented. Across the globe, this has meant working with individuals, with community leaders, with traditional village headmen and chiefs, with health workers, with pharmaceutical representatives, with businessmen, with corporate executives, and with everyone in between.

Last week, the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines reached Zambia and vaccination efforts started in full swing. It also marked my own first dose, taken at the Javits Center – a site typically used for conventions and conferences and now serving to protect 10,000 New Yorkers a day. And so, I find myself feeling incredibly grateful – to the researchers who laid the groundwork for vaccine development for small pox in the 1790s, the scientists who developed the COVID-19 vaccine over the course of the last year, the factory workers who manufactured millions of little glass vials to the people delivering the vaccine, the people who volunteered to be part of the first trials to ensure the vaccine is safe, the truck drivers and shippers who are working to deliver these vaccines across the globe, the volunteers and armies facilitating the vaccination sites, all the way through to the doctors, nurses and health care workers finally delivering the shot into our arms. As always, we have shown that we do our best work when we work together.

It has been a long year. We are starting to see the light again, and I find myself remembering Marizani. He passed away a couple of years ago – and if he had been born today, it’s likely he would have entered early childhood programs at Joel Community School in a couple of years and continued on to secondary school. He would have been able to thrive, partly because of a inactivated / weakened poliovirus treatment either given by injection or orally, available to Zambian children today.

-Reshma