GPEI Q1: Your documentary about polio, ‘The Shot Felt ‘Round the World’, and your recent articles suggest the polio vaccination success paradox: because many people no longer remember iron lungs and childhood paralysis or the fear surrounding polio, they may also forget why vaccines and eradication efforts still matter. How can storytelling make this ‘forgotten’ disease emotionally compelling for a new generation and show that polio eradication urgently needs to be achieved?

It is true that vaccines have been a victim of their own success, which overall is a good thing. But while we are close, we know that the job of eradicating polio is not yet over. My documentary ‘The Shot Felt Round the World’, began when I first came back to my hometown from Hollywood to teach at the University of Pittsburgh and my students and I filmed the 50th anniversary of the Salk polio vaccine. We were fortunate to speak with many of those who had worked alongside Dr. Jonas Salk in his lab. My own child was in grade school while we were editing ‘The Shot Felt Round the World’ and the teacher asked me to show the rough cut to a class of fourth graders. I was hesitant, because the movie showed children in wheelchairs and iron lungs, but the teacher insisted. I was taken aback at how riveted the children were and that’s when I realized that polio is this strange cross between a horror movie and a dark fairy tale.

In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, summers were called ‘polio season’ and local and state health authorities shut down public spaces – including public swimming pools and theatres – during peak polio outbreak years. Parents were afraid to send their kids to birthday parties for fear they would be infected by the invisible polio virus that could put their children in wheelchairs, the dreaded iron lung, or even result in death. In 1938, kids across America began to send dimes to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House as part of the ‘March of Dimes’ campaign. President Roosevelt himself was in a wheelchair because of polio. Some of those dimes went to a then unknown 33-year-old – Dr. Jonas Salk in Pittsburgh – who, with his team, was working on an experimental polio vaccine. Thanks to collaborative efforts such as these and the work being done by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), today children in most countries around the world can now go to sleep without ever having to worry about getting polio. But the polio virus still threatens children in several countries around the world, and we must work urgently together to ensure the virus is eradicated everywhere.

After the film was finished, we had this crazy idea of having young people watch our movie and make their own videos through the ‘Take a Shot at Changing the World’ contest. With support from the Gates Foundation, the Grable Foundation and the R.K. Mellon Foundation, as well as the Heinz Endowments, we had young people do their own research and use their imagination and creativity. We piloted a program where 70 schools had students talking to their grandparents, making animations and even rap songs about polio. Prizes were given out by Dr. Peter Salk, who was ten when his father was developing the polio vaccine.