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Memories of the sugar cube vaccination

Daniel Marsula/Post-Gazette

Memories of the sugar cube vaccination

As a practicing pediatrician in Pittsburgh, I spend at least a third of my day discussing COVID-19 and working hard to get my patient’s parents as excited about getting immunized as I am.

The first vaccines are now being distributed and given to a wave of optimistic Americans. This is the best medical news anyone has heard in nine months, but it is not the first time I will have played a small role in a community-wide immunization program.

I was 10 when my dad, a research pharmacist at Smith, Kline & French Laboratories in Philadelphia, was placed in charge of a major vaccination effort where we lived in nearby Elkins Park. It was the early 1960s, 18 months before we would meet the Beatles.

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Everyone I knew had already received their polio shots, which had put the brakes on the scourge that trapped kids in iron lungs and left too many of them with permanent neurologic deficits. Now we were getting something better. This was the oral polio vaccine. (Although we no longer use the oral vaccine to prevent polio, at the time it was ground-breaking with longer lasting immunity that lent itself beautifully for mass vaccination.)

It took place on a Saturday. I remember it was a warm, blue-sky day. Three buddies of mine and I rode our bikes (without helmets or parental supervision) to the junior high school parking lot. Families arrived with kids in strollers and dogs on leashes.

Card tables had been set up with colorful balloons tied to them with string. Several mothers brought cookie sheets, the same ones they used to bake chocolate-chip cookies the rest of the year. Hundreds of sugar cubes were lined up on them in tidy little rows. Several drops of the pink polio vaccine were dripped onto each one.

Then came the first of my three memorable moments of that day. My dad made sure I was the very first person in line to snatch a sugar cube and pop it in my mouth. A lot of eyes were on me. I said something like, “Mmmm, it’s really good,” and got a nice laugh.

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More and more families arrived. The line grew quickly. Everyone I knew was there. Someone brought a Frisbee. A bunch of my dad’s friends were off to one side telling jokes. I slipped back into the line and enjoyed seconds. My mom shook her head disapprovingly. It was a block party.

Then my dad came over to me and my buddies and pointed out the snaking line that had formed. You couldn’t see the end of it. It was no longer hundreds of people; it was a thousand.

“We’ve got a problem.” He was holding four bags of rock-hard, frozen vaccine. “We can’t thaw the bags fast enough. I need you guys to hold a bag between your hands to warm them up.”

This was my second moment. We each grabbed a bag. I read aloud the word “Sabin” printed on the side of my bag but pronounced it SAH-bin. With the freezing-cold bag sandwiched between our hands, we held them up as if we were praying and made sure everyone near us knew how much our hands hurt. I was having the best time.

Not 10 minutes went by before I found my dad and proudly handed him four bags of cold, but liquified, SAH-bin vaccine. Right away he was impressed. “Wow!” he said, “that’s really fast. It took me 15 minutes to do one, and my hands were killing me.”

He smiled proudly.

I smiled right back at him. “Me, too.” For effect, I waved a hand around as if it still hurt from the cold.

And now for my third moment. I said to my dad, “We came up with the best idea! We put the bags down our pants.” I glanced at my buddies. “They really thawed fast.” The four of us beamed, delighted at how clever we were.

My dad’s face tightened. Someone in line called out a friendly “Hello” to him, but he ignored it.

Then he leaned down so he could speak quietly. “In your pants or underpants?”

I knew that tone of voice. I cleared my throat. “Underpants.”

My three friends took several steps back, leaving me pretty much alone with my dad. No one was beaming. No one was smiling.

The world seemed awfully quiet when my dad reached out, grabbed a huge fistful of my T-shirt and lifted me 6 inches in the air with one hand. I must have looked like a marionette puppet.

He spoke though his teeth, loud enough for my friends to hear. “We won’t have enough vaccine if I throw these away. If you say one single word about this to anyone, you won’t be able to sit comfortably for six weeks.”

The four of us started nodding our heads so hard I still don’t know why our neck muscles didn’t go into some sort of spasm. He put me down gently and handed those bags of vaccine to one of the women so it could be dripped onto the army of waiting sugar cubes.

I know what you’re thinking, but not one single person in Elkins Park ever developed a whiff of a side effect. My dad’s program was a rousing success.

I will never know if my mother found out what happened. Maybe she would have thought it was funny. And I can report with complete honesty I never breathed one word of what happened that day until after he passed away 14 years ago.

Now it’s 2020. I imagine each of us knows someone who has been hurt by COVID-19. But we are on the verge of something that will save lives in a magnificent way. As I write this, I am not certain when I will be offered my vaccination. But I will be quick to roll up my sleeve.

And if my dad were running the show today, I’ll bet you a nickel I would be first in line, just like with the sugar cubes.

Jim Tucker is a Fox Chapel resident, a practicing pediatrician with UPMC Children’s Community Care and the author of three medical mysteries.

First Published: January 3, 2021, 5:00 a.m.

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 (Daniel Marsula/Post-Gazette)
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