Four years ago, on March 16, 2020, as a City Court Judge, the New York State Court System ordered us out of our courtrooms and even out of the court offices. So began the journey to understand what the Nation’s first pandemic since 1918 meant as a life and death matter.

In some ways American life is back to “normal”, but in other ways big changes in our lives may be permanent, such as millions of Americans continuing to work from home.

Now that almost every American has had Covid and/or has had vaccinations against Covid, our government health experts recently announced that we could finally treat Covid much like other respiratory viruses.

That does not mean Covid is now just an irritant like the “common cold.” The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that as of mid-February more than 21,000 people were hospitalized with Covid and that there had already been roughly 10,000 Covid-related deaths in 2024.

Covid in 2024 is still “not just like the flu.” The CDC reports that annual deaths from the flu ranged from a low of 4,900 to a high of 51,000 between 2010 and 2023. Covid, in stark contrast, killed 1,183,000 Americans from February 2020 through March 2 of 2024.

The good news now for most Americans under 65 is that Covid symptoms can be treated at home. For those over 65, the antiviral pill, Paxlovid, from the American drug company Pfizer, can slow the reproduction of the virus in our bodies.

Our National Institute of Health (NIH) reports that Paxlovid is very effective against severe Covid, reducing the risk of death by 73% if taken within the first five days of an infection.

How did America make this great progress in just 4 years?

Our scientists at our research institutions and our drug companies did marvelous, almost miraculous, work coming up with vaccines against Covid in short order. Their monumental achievements got largely overshadowed by Covid deniers and vaccine deniers of all types.

On October 2, 2023 two scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, who spent years of research to understand messenger RNA and how to modify it to rapidly develop lifesaving vaccines amid the global Covid-19 Pandemic, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Essentially none of us know a thing about these life-saving scientists, Drew Weissman and Katalin Karako, but millions of our fellow Americans know that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a vaccine denier.

What a contrast to the Nation’s celebration of the arrival of the Dr. Jonas Salk polio vaccine in 1955 and the arrival of the Dr. Albert Sabin polio vaccine in 1961.

According to the Mayo Clinic, before the arrival of these two polio vaccines, several polio (paralytic poliomyelitis) epidemics occurred between 1948 and 1955.

1952 saw the worst polio epidemic in U.S. history. Out of 57,000 reported cases 3,000 died and 21,000 were left with some paralysis. The U.S. population was only 157,000,000 compared to more than double that number now.

Americans were panicked by the threat polio posed, especially to their children. Many Americans avoided public gatherings, crowds, fairs, sporting events and swimming pools.

Before the arrival of the polio vaccines, contracting paralytic polio could mean living in an iron lung. A few weeks ago the national news informed us of the death of a 76 year old polio victim. He contracted polio at age 6 in 1954 and had lived the last 70 years in an iron lung. Such a nightmarish prospect would have haunted any parent in the early 1950s.

From 1952-1955 Dr. Jonas Salk and his colleagues researched and developed a polio vaccine. Their vaccine was licensed in April 1955. Dr. Albert Sabin by 1961 developed a second polio vaccine that was simply delivered on a sugar cube. School children lined up for their life-saving polio vaccines. I was one of those school children.

Prior to the Salk and Sabin vaccines there was an average of 16,000 cases of paralytic polio a year. Thanks to these vaccines by 1994 polio was considered eliminated in North and South America.

Without these vaccines, polio would still be a scourge. Our CDC reports that to this day there is “no cure for paralytic polio and no specific treatment.”

We Americans would feel better about ourselves and our country if we would celebrate our scientific and medical achievements in responding to the Covid Pandemic as relieved parents did almost 70 years ago when the Salk and Sabin vaccines removed the nightmarish prospect that your 6 year old child would live in an iron lung.

Fred Larson is a retired Jamestown City Court judge, serving from 2014 through 2022 and is currently a Chautauqua County legislator.