People from India remember life before the polio vaccine. They don't want to go back

Vijay Yeldandia was an energetic and rambunctious toddler when he was growing up in India. But at the age of two, he came down with polio and became paralyzed from the neck down.

Over time, “I learned how to walk with braces and crutches,” recalls Yeldandia, now a professor of medicine and surgery at the University of Illinois Chicago who is primarily based in India. “I had a different childhood, because I would see all of my peers going out, my siblings going out and playing cricket, and I was just sitting and watching them.”

For many people like Yeldandia who grew up in India or have family members there, polio is a recent — a deeply personal — memory. Vaccines for the disease didn’t become widely available in the country until the early 1970s, nearly two decades after they were distributed in the U.S. At that time, India had an estimated 200,000 polio cases per year. It was finally declared polio-free in 2014.

Now, as vaccine skepticism and anti-vaccine rhetoric gain more political power with president-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, Indians and Indian-Americans who went on to careers in medicine and public health are expressing alarm at the possibility that policy changes could allow the virus to spread again in the U.S. That worry has deepened in the wake of a recent New York Times story about how lawyer Aaron Siri, a longtime ally of RFK Jr. who is helping vet candidates for positions in the health department, brought forth legal challenges to the approval of polio vaccine in 2022. 

Upon learning of Siri’s petition, “all I could see in my mind’s eye was the incredible suffering that polio has caused,” said Aparna Nair, a historian of public health and disability at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She thought of a family member who’d told her the story of “standing next to her son helpless while he cried receiving therapy for polio. He still has something of a limp.”

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