My mom was telling me about a friend of hers who had polio when they were kids last night. She spent a good chunk of her childhood in an iron lung. They could go to her window to visit with her. She was so weak she couldn't even smile or really turn her head.

Eventually she recovered and had to wear leg braces and use crutches, but managed to get through life despite the disadvantages the virus left her with. Now in her later years the virus is flaring back up and causing new issues: pain, severe muscle weakness, exhaustion.

Having seen a vaccine preventable illness up close my mother has no hesitation about vaccines. As a society we've forgotten how horrible these diseases were, and it seems to allow us to talk ourselves into the mad belief that the cure is worse than the disease. My God, it's not.

When I was in high school we had a classmate from Laos who also had leg braces and crutches from Polio. Some of these diseases that we've eradicated in the west still exist to some degree in other parts of the world.

I still remember how mightily she had to struggle to just get around, all because a virus our country eliminated generations ago still existed where she happened to be born.

It was one of those things that drove home how different things could have been had I been born between a different arbitrary set of lines drawn on a map, and how so much of my identity and ability came down to random chance.

We've been given access to the fruits of generations of scientific labor for low or sometimes no cost, and we sit around on the internet dreaming up wild conspiracies to talk ourselves out of using it. What a silly and stupid people we are.