Good afternoon and welcome to the City of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, June 12th, and I'm Doctor David Margolius, the director of public health at the city of Cleveland and a member of the Mount Sinai Health Foundation board of directors.

It is my honor to introduce today's forum, which is also presented in partnership with the Mount Sinai Health Foundation.

The name Doctor Jonas Salk is synonymous with one of the greatest public health achievements of all time the polio vaccine.

The arrival of vaccine in 1955 was a beacon of hope and reinforced the role science can play to serve the public good.

When asked who owned the patent for the vaccine, Salk famously replied, there is no patent.

Could you patent the sun?

In 1994, and just one year before Doctor Salk passed, polio was considered eliminated in North and South America.

Today, vaccine hesitancy, driven by a host of reasons, has eroded childhood immunization rates in some parts of the country and reignited a debate over vaccines as a stress test for public trust and science.

Continuing the work of Doctor Jonas Salk is his son and our speaker today, Doctor Peter L. Salk.

Doctor Salk is formerly president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology.

A graduate from Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, doctor would go on to work in his father's laboratory at the Institute for Biological Studies from 1972 to 1984, and again from 1991 to 1995.

Together, they would research the biology and immunotherapy of cancer and autoimmune diseases.

He also developed an and inactivated vaccine for HIV infection.

Today we will hear more about the Salt legacy, the state of public health, public trust and science, and the future of public health.

Moderating the conversation is Doctor Arthur Lavin, founder and board president of grandparents for vaccines and spending 40 years practicing medicine doctor Lavin is now a retired pediatrician.

He's also the author of two books on parenting.

Before we begin, a quick reminder for our live stream and radio audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to (330)541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

Now members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Doctor Peter Salk and Doctor Arthur Lavin.

Thank you, director, and thank you for the kind introduction.

But I will say today, I before I come before you today as a grandfather of four beautiful grandchildren who I love very much.

Grandparents for vaccines would also like to thank President Mitch Bourque and Chair Jimmy Ratner and his fellow directors and the staff of the Mount Sinai Foundation for their vision to be the first in the nation to fund grandparents for vaccines, helping us take serious steps to scale up our national movement and whose support extends to sponsoring today's form.

Thank you.

We are also grateful to Dan CEO Mark Ross and the City Club of Cleveland.

Good health is one of the foundations of a healthy democracy, a concept we celebrate together today.

And personally, I want to thank and recognize Sandra Turner and Marge Simon, who are here, is original meeting that Marge invited me to to meet Sandra, who's a friend of Doctor Salk's that made today possible.

Thank you.

Also like to thank several leading members of our community who've teamed up with Grandparents Vaccines, and very honored to be working with Miss Suzanne Rush of the County Board of Health is here, who in turn has helped connect us with Miss Marquette Frost, the National Council of Negro Women, Bishop Omar Medina of the community Faith collaborative and a leader of Hispanic churches in Ohio.

And Matt Bavaria of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Thank you.

And lastly, I like to thank the people of America who have embraced grandparents for vaccines across the land, with spokespeople in over 30 states and over 75 cities and towns.

As our country's 205th anniversary approaches, we live in a moment that bookends a particular span of our American story.

Today, we gather to celebrate one end of that pair of bookends, a time when America rose up to embrace protecting our grandchildren, a dramatic moment when polio threatened every child.

And the country responded.

You'll hear today from Doctor Peter Salk, the son of Jonas Salk, who worked tirelessly to make that happen.

This stands in grave contrast to the moment we live in, when that exact threat, polio, is being invited back into our grandchildren's lives.

Today, we stand on the other end of this set of bookends.

Today, polio threatens.

It's estimated that millions of children in the United States are right now unprotected against polio.

The virus still spreads in the world and could appear here any day.

We have strayed.

So it's time to come back to what counts the lives and well-being of those who America's grandparents treasure with all our love, our grandchildren.

Today at the forum, we invite all present here and on stream and those who will watch later to join this movement to protect our grandchildren.

We are inviting grandparents and anyone who's a grandchild, which I think includes most people here.

It's easy.

We just go to grandparents vaccines.

You can simply join.

You can share your story, the story of your family or someone you cared for who suffered from one of these now preventable diseases.

And we are pleased.

You can also be part of this movement now by supporting our ability to have our stories.

Change the national conversation by making any donation you feel is right.

Jane Ward from Grandparents Vaccines.

Our media consultant is here from new Jersey to help to share our flier and help guide you to join our efforts.

Grandparents vaccines launch its work on Grandparents Day in September of 2025 to mobilize the voices of America's 67 million grandparents to share our love and concern, to ask the nation to join us in that love and concern all towards moving our nation back, toward celebrating vaccines as a protection that shows our love.

It brings to mind the story of one of our state leaders, Jan, in the state of Washington, who watched her twin brother come down with polio, die of it, only to be hit herself with polio six weeks after surviving to share her story across the country and now on the grandparents vaccines website.

And this is why we are so grateful to have the opportunity to sit with you, Doctor Peter Salk, and share the story of a time when our nation rose up to protect our children and grandchildren.

So we'll go to the first question.

So welcome back to Cleveland.

Thank you very much, Arthur.

Maybe we can start.

Thank you.

So maybe we could start the conversation with a story you might share, maybe one story that reminds you of days you spent in Cleveland.

Oh, well, it was a very important moment in my life.

I was doing my two years of internship and residency here, and one morning in my second year, walked into a medical staff conference where there was a very striking woman across the table.

We discussed issues amongst all of us having to do with the patients that were being cared for, and afterwards, I managed to have a moment to say hello to this person who, eight months later, we became husband and wife.

That was.

That seems to happen a lot in Cleveland.

So doctor talk, you were present at one of the great moments of American history, a moment when curiosity and ingenuity brought relief to a nation crying out for protection and a terrifying threat.

We would love to hear this story today.

Let's start with why the why was the nation crying out for relief?

What was it about polio that demanded the nation's help?

Polio was a fearsome disease.

In the past, when sanitation was not very good, it wasn't such a problem because although it spread readily, children would be infected at a time when they were when they were still protected by their mothers antibodies from the placenta and from the breast milk.

Then a sanitation improved.

It wasn't until much later in life that a person, a child, would be exposed to polio, and in that circumstance, the likelihood of becoming paralyzed or not surviving was just magnified intensely.

What we were experiencing as a country were waves of epidemics of polio that generally came in the summer, and there was no ability to prepare, nothing to do to prevent one's own child from being infected.

The people were terrified each year.

Fortunately, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which had been founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who himself had experienced polio infection in his youth through the fundraising of the March of Dimes.

That portion of their organization gave people in this country the opportunity to participate in research that led to polio vaccine.

And this was it was remarkable because the fear was so pervasive.

There were 100 million people in this country.

This was not a government funded program.

The people that gave their dimes and dollars to try and seek an end to this, this terrifying problem.

In April of 1955, after concerted work by my father and his very skilled research team at the University of Pittsburgh, there was a massive national field trial that involved parents allowing their children to participate in something that wasn't known.

Was this going to work or was it not going to work?

1.8 million children were involved, and it took a year for the results to be analyzed.

In April 12th of 1955, the 10th anniversary of the death of of President Roosevelt, the announcement was made that the vaccine was safe, effective and potent.

Thank you.

So I want to come back to that sense, that moment before the vaccine was developed in the sense of fear.

Last night at the Mount Sinai Foundation annual meeting, a member of the audience came forward to me and shared that he was at a swimming hole with his buddy every summer, and they went to a swimming hole every day.

And one day his friend came down with polio and survived it.

But he limped the rest of his life, and he spent the rest of his life feeling like literally there.

But for the grace of God go I. There was a sense that parents had that dread was in the land, and there was an amazing moment when there was fear connected with with a response and turn our attention to what your father did.

What was it?

What was the idea?

I mean, your father was seeing this happen.

He experienced he was in the country like everyone else.

I also want to bookmark that 100 million people donated to this cause.

But there were only 160 million people that lived in the country.

So imagine that.

That's how united the United States.

There was a United States.

And the what?

Your father's living in this time of hazard.

What was what was your sense of his response to that dread?

Well, let me just say something in background about this, because it colors this whole experience, which is that when my father was young, he used to pray that he could do something to be helpful for humanity.

And this was an opportunity, after having first worked on the very first influenza vaccine, to take that same kind of technique and focus it on the problem of polio.

So in the laboratory, very painstaking, careful work to make sure that everything was on track.

And his intention was his whole focus was on, we've got to get this job done and we've got to get it done quickly.

So his his passion for science was driven by his love for humanity.

That's where it came from.

Yeah.

That was the engine.

And how did he.

How did he come up with the idea of how to approach the polio vaccine?

There was no polio vaccine before this, right.

So so he had to come up with the idea.

How do you come up with the idea of this vaccine?

Well, there had been a couple of attempts to make vaccines in the 1930s against polio, which didn't work out, and it was clear that this had to be done very systematically and very carefully.

The whole notion that he was working with was the idea of using a killed virus, one that would be not able to cause a paralytic infection.

And it took a lot of effort to define all so very carefully what needed to be done in the in to create that kind of inactivated immunogenic that would that would form a vaccine and then step by step to roll out the testing to be sure that it was everything was safe, that the immune response that was banned, it was present.

And then moving into this very large national field trial to determine definitively was it or was it not effective.

So there's so many extraordinary moments in this story of triumph over a threat.

One I will treasure always is a very dramatic moment.

So I don't know if people appreciate this, but one ethical standard when you do a study is if you invent something, you shouldn't be the one to study whether it works or not.

And to your father's credit, he turned over the work of this, I think, one of the largest clinical trials in human history of his vaccine.

He turned entirely over to someone else, so he didn't know the results of the study as they were happening.

Can you tell us a story of how who it was that did the study his relationship to your father?

And I want to come to this.

I think one of the more extraordinary moments I know of where Jonas Salk is sitting at the breakfast table.

I think you were there or in the house, in any case.

And, and and the investigator came to tell him what the results are and what that day was.

So let's start with his relationship with the person who conducted the study.

Yeah.

My father went to medical school.

Yes.

In his medical school, the very first year, he was exposed to the following notion from one of the professor in that course that with you can use an inactivated kind of procedure for vaccines against some bacterial diseases, tetanus and diphtheria, inactivating the toxin.

And that made sense because you could make the talk the what had been a toxic chemical safe, but still able to be recognized by the immune system to prevent the real toxin from harming you.

So that was one procedure.

But the next day, the next lecture, the professor said to the students, you know, when it comes to viral illnesses such as polio or influenza, you can't do that because the body needs in order to produce protective immunity, the body needs to experience an actual infection by the virus.

And my father just didn't understand why that should be the case and asked the professor, how come?

And the professor's answer was basically, well, just because.

And that didn't seem satisfying to my father.

And so he decided that this was something he would want to work with.

There was another professor at the medical school whom he later worked with, who was interested in the same thing, trying to use a chemically and activated virus.

And this was Thomas Francis Junior.

That work proceeded.

My father went on to complete his own clinical training after medical school, and then went to an Arbor, Michigan, to join doctor Francis, who had gone there, worked with Doctor Francis and his team on the flu vaccine.

And during World War two, successful, introduced in the armed forces at the end of that period and then immediately thereafter for for publicly use.

The very first flew flu vaccine.

Amazing.

And when it came time to do these this a decade after that, to do this large experiment, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis picked Doctor Francis to be the person to run that trial and to take a year to analyze the results.

And what you said about the breakfast business was that Doctor Francis did not tell anybody, including my father, what the results were as this and as this analysis was taking place.

So on the day that the the morning that the results of this massive study were announced, that's when my father learned what the results were.

So did the public know that there would be an unveiling, a result?

It was known that the results were going to be announced at this press conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

But the nation didn't know what the results were.

Nobody knew what they were.

So the dread of polio hung over the land, and at a certain date and time, the country tuned in to find out whether the that the dread would be ended.

As with the ringing of the bell.

That's what.

What happened?

Doctor Francis spoke his words.

The press had a press release given to them, and?

And some of this was televised closed circuit to the nation's physicians.

In one stroke, the fear was lifted.

And what was the.

Yes, please.

So were you there when Doctor Francis came over to share the news with.

No, no, no, this was this was.

I was not at that breakfast.

Yeah, yeah, but your dad told you about it?

I learned afterwards that was the case.

Yeah.

So.

But Thomas Francis knew the results.

And he walks into your dad's meeting to deliver this news.

It was not my father who delivered the news.

This was Doctor Francis.

Yeah.

Delivering the news to to your dad.

And what was the.

What was the sense?

What have you heard?

What do you recollect was the response to the country when this when this bell was wrong?

Well, this I really learned in retrospect.

I was 11 years old at the time.

And it's the kind of work that you're doing now, talking to people from that era and gathering their experiences is this is when it really becomes revealed just how pervasive the fear was and what a difference it made in everyone's life that something could be done to protect against this kind of dangerous, dangerous situation.

Well, I remember you telling me that schools closed, factories whistles blue.

I mean, there was just a sense of.

Celebration, really a celebration of protection.

And that's one of the themes that we really want to celebrate, celebrate and emphasize today.

We would love to see our nation return to a conversation where vaccines and the concept of protection is celebrated again, which is why it's so helpful for you to be here with us today and share what was like in that moment when we did that.

Once we couldn't do it again.

We absolutely can.

So, doctor, I have to say, personally, I've admired your work in science and in the realms where science is at its best, that is, to seek to improve the human condition.

So could you share some of your own hope for our nation, returning to celebrate to this idea of protecting our children and grandchildren?

Yeah, it's something that is so important.

And we have what I think is fundamentally at base here is that we have to understand how to relate to each other in constructive and cooperative ways.

It's so easy.

We as human beings, we have various parts to our nature.

Some of them are generous and kind and understanding, and it's just part of being an a creature at times to be self-protective and antagonistic or get into get into fights.

And this was something that my father actually really thought a great deal about.

In addition to thinking about the specific problems of how do we deal with polio, how do we deal with Aids and and so forth.

He was really concerned towards the later part of his life about what do we do as a species, how are we going to prepare for dealing with all of the issues that face us?

One could say in public health, because what they're all of basically every problem that we are dealing with is the problem of public health or depletion of the environment getting just there is nothing that doesn't have an effect on us as our mental and emotional and physical health, as human beings and as a city community, a nation world.

So his he was very concerned with how do we transition from a period where the forces that are involved more with self fulfillment or self gain, etc., move into expanded understanding of getting along and working cooperatively as as species?

So that's what I think we really need to be turning our attention to at this point is cultivating means by which we can live most cooperatively and effectively.

It sounds like a message that be very comfortable for grandparents to champion, and I'm sure grandchildren be very grateful for that.

Your father wrote several books to write.

What sort of books did he write?

Well, he wrote four books.

The first was called Man Unfolding.

Don't take the male gender as a. That's that was the parlance of the time, the next, the survival of the wisest.

Of the play on the survival of the fittest notion.

The third book he wrote with my youngest brother Jonathan, which was World Population and Human Values, New Reality, and finally, anatomy of reality, merging of intuition and reason.

This this was the way this man thought.

He just thought very broadly and with a sense of integration about these themes that are now, I think, really front and center.

We have all of these specific problems that we're dealing with.

And yes, we have to deal with them effectively.

Some are in the realm of science and others are in the realm of international relations and so on and so forth.

But still, it's these, these deep issues about being a human and how in interrupt you for a second, I mean, my own my own thoughts, as you have been discussing with me in my trip to to Cleveland, was a rather difficult one.

The air there was weather, weather conditions in and around the Chicago where the plane was to have the connecting flight that was disrupted everything.

Our plane ended up in a different state and it was a really quite an adventure, quite an adventure getting here.

Okay, I'm about to need a little help reconnecting my my thought process here for hope, for the future and the problems we face.

Yeah.

Oh my goodness gracious.

This is the problem of being at the particular stage of life.

That I find that I am.

It's going to come back.

So I remember you were telling me we were very concerned.

I mean, Doctor Salk was flying from San Diego to Chicago to here in Chicago.

Airport was essentially closed that day, and you ended up landing in Kentucky.

And it was a very fine state, but not where you wanted to be.

And, and Mount Sinai staff.

And I was like, you know, Apollo 13 were like trying to patch things together here.

And, and we were worried you got in late at night and you had a big program coming up.

And I was so impressed at your equanimity because what you said to me was, this was a learning experience.

And I think what I gather from you bringing that story together is that we all face issues in our world, but if we can approach them with equanimity, they can be solved.

And you really exhibited that yesterday because you just took the stage.

And, I mean, we were all exhausted, but you were.

It looked like nothing happened.

And I think that's a great lesson for us, for us today.

And, you know, it makes me think.

Did the thought come back going, yeah, it makes me think that if we think about the bookend concept again, we began this conversation with the time in the 1950s when the country was united in celebrating the idea of protecting our children and grandchildren.

And here we are at the other end.

But you're here today.

We can come back to that beginning again.

And it reminds you of something you want to say.

The thought came back as a way I brought that up to begin with.

I don't remember which airport it was, but getting off the plane in these strange circumstances came out looking for where do I go next?

And standing there were a very small group of people, and one gentleman looked at me and him and greeted me as if I was a long lost friend and and asked me how I was, was I okay?

And I was trying to think of how do I know this?

How do I know this person?

Because it was just such an intimate and intimate thing.

And he looked at me and we we sort of put our hands on, on each other and others shoulder.

And he looked at me and said, you're fine.

This was a total stranger.

But what was the effect on me?

It was just remarkable to to be have this uplifting experience.

And what this is just is a reminder of this.

What can we do as human beings to help our humanity?

What an effect an individual can have just through their own way of of being.

It was an absolutely astounding experience.

So, so pleased you got to that point.

Because if you take a look at grandparents vaccines, we have a YouTube channel.

And the great discoveries we found is just what you're talking about.

So where we go in the country, we find that there are a huge reservoir of people in the grandparents generation who are alive during these times.

And I mentioned the story of Jan, but there's many others.

Got story of a mother who lost her child to a type of bacterial meningitis at an age at a time when the vaccine wasn't available, and she's part of grandparents vaccine, telling the story to let people know.

Don't let these diseases back into our life.

Don't invite them back in.

This is what the grandparents are basically saying to the country right now.

Yeah, some people have questions and suspicions of vaccines.

That's fine.

But if we if we abandon vaccines, let me tell you the world that you'll be living in, because we lived in that world and those grandparents sharing those stories, I mean, I can share stories with you and they're they're moving.

But if you go to the YouTube channel and see them, they they contain such power and they have the power of just that person who tapped you on that shoulder, they come to you through the screen and they say to you.

We're here to help, and we don't have to go down this road.

We don't have to let polio come back and ravage the country again.

We don't have to allow meningitis to come back in.

We we eliminated measles in the year 2000.

It was gone out of the country.

It is only here at our invitation.

We have the will to eliminate it again.

So we can live in a country free of measles.

We can live in a world free of measles, of polio, meningitis, of all these scourges, really.

And as grandparents were not really talking medically, we're talking about the lives of our grandchildren, the grandchildren we care for.

So I think that story is so powerful and really, I think frames what we're doing at grandparents vaccines in terms of the power of story, because what we're aiming for is to change the national conversation.

We believe that right now, the national conversation is focused on this theme of suspicion that there are things to suspect about vaccines.

And we welcome those questions.

But we don't want suspicion to be the dominant mode.

We want protection to once again become the dominant concept that we look at our children and grandchildren.

The first thing we think about is how do we protect them?

Fine.

So we put that number one.

Now how do we protect them?

Make sure we're offering something safe.

And those questions are more than welcome.

And they're big piece of feeling that you're protecting someone.

So the questions and the conversations are welcome.

But we want the bedrock of the national conversation to be protection instead of suspicion.

And I think today is special because it gives us a chance to get that message out.

And you've really helped us deliver it in so many ways.

Are there other things that you'd like to make sure audience hears from you about before we proceed?

Because we're getting close to the question and answer time, you're happy to move into questions and answers.

But I guess just to say this, go back into a sense, say this again about my father.

He was a very unusual person, and he just he had the ability to deal with the specific, very detailed issues.

All of the research work.

He wanted to expand potential opportunities for doing continuing fundamental basic biological research in order to lay a basis of understanding for how one can arrive at new ways of intervening to create and prolong and improve health.

He wanted to create a new Institute for Experimental Medicine, which ultimately became the Saul Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

He hadn't wanted his name on it, but it was the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis that helped with the funding to get that started.

And if Jonas, if you want this to succeed, we need to use your name.

He.

So we had the ability.

He worked with this wonderful architect, Louis Kahn, on the Song Institute.

It's just an extraordinary building.

Very inspirational.

All the fundamental, nitty gritty details to make these things happen.

And yet this business of sitting back and looking at the big picture of about humanity and where we are in the course of our own evolution as a species, we hear about the space missions and looking back on Earth from from a distance.

And in a way, that was what my father was doing.

He was stepping back and looking at us as if from a difference.

This is a really precious moment in time, so much contention in so many different ways.

And yet we do, as individuals and as a society, have the ability to forge a different and a more constructive way of interacting and of solving the problems that we have in front of us.

Thank you.

It's inspiring.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So now we're about to begin our audience Q&A.

And for those just tuning in via our livestream radio audience, my name is Arthur Lavin, president and board and founder of Grandparents Vaccines.

I'm here with doctor Peter Salk, formerly president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation.

We are discussing the Salk legacy, the state of public trust in science, and the future of public health.

We welcome questions from everyone city Club members, guests for those and those joining us via our livestream or live radio broadcast at 89.7.

WKSU Ideastream public media.

If you'd like to text a question, please text it to 33054157495794, and that's (330)541-5794.

And city club staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please.

I was six years old and living in Detroit, and I remember participating in the vaccine study, and we had a close family friend whose son obviously got the placebo because he got polio and spent the rest of his life in an iron lung.

Wow.

My question to you is what public opposition was there in 1955 when your father was introducing the vaccine?

Who led that opposition in?

Can you compare it to what we're experiencing today?

Thanks.

Thank you.

Please, doctor Salk, there were voices that spoke up that were trying to frighten people away from what was about to happen.

And before the field trial, Walter Winchell.

News personality, was saying that, ladies and gentlemen, they're preparing coffins for your children.

Oh, my.

There's so many opportunities to create fear and so uncertainty.

Fortunately, those voices did not make a difference.

Ultimately, in terms of this was something that was being done carefully and appropriately, and we arrived.

It doesn't mean that there aren't bumps along the way, and there were some bumps along the way.

Indeed.

But the system ended up working, and now we're in the situation, in the position that we are in, at least with respect to polio, where we can manage things appropriately.

So I'm really glad you came forward.

Thank you for sharing your story.

The people, the 1.8 million people who participate in the study are called polio pioneers.

So you are polio pioneer and grandparents vaccines.

Is excited about connecting with the Thomas Francis Group, the University of Michigan, to begin honoring the polio pioneers across the country.

I think part of your question, though, was how do you compare the opposition in the 1950s to the opposition?

Today was there, but I don't know if people are familiar with the name Ultra Winchell, but he was a major personality, so I didn't realize that he actually took to the airwaves or the newsprint to come out in opposition.

That's a very powerful story.

But how would you compare that sort of opposition to today's opposition?

Well, you know, again, there are people who have really focused on problems with vaccines.

There are problems with all sorts of things.

Anything in the medical realm.

So many things have side effects and all of these need to be taken into account.

I don't have any concerns about that, but I do have some concerns about is being so enthusiastic about opposing opposing things that the balance gets lost.

We lose the priority of protection.

Well, what we lose is if on either side of things, if one walls oneself off and become focused only on a particular theme and is ringing that bell, we lose the conversation.

And what I've been wanting and hoping for for these last number of years.

I'd love to see a good conversation take place because there are real issues that need to be confronted and understood, and as long as and again, I think that goes back to this other theme, as long as each of us, on whatever side we're taking, are open to understanding the issues that the other side is, is concerned about and bringing.

And if we can come together and talk about it and really look not not closed mindedly, not just trying to hammer on whichever side we're on, hammer on, okay, this is the truth or this is the truth, but okay, let's sit back.

We're we're in this together.

Yes.

Thank you.

I think we're ready for the next question.

So continuing on the theme of opposition to vaccines, I'm curious if you have a specific approach to counteract the arguments where some people make that vaccines are simply a way for the pharmaceutical companies to make more money.

It's not simply a way.

Of course, businesses have their their real concerns.

Making money is one of them.

But there is a public good that is being served here.

And again, it's just part of the complexity of life.

Stockholders want one thing, and that doesn't necessarily mean that that what's going on is bad.

The pharmaceutical industry has done so much that has been good and useful and helpful.

There have been some glitches here and there.

And again, we just have as a society, we have to strike the right balance.

feel as though the goal of changing the conversation is the critical message here.

And story by story, voice by voices, like the dimes in the, you know, March for dimes bucket, we're collecting the possibility of seeing the world differently than what's presented to many of us now.

My question is, given all the success that you've had so far, and it's been pretty meteoric in ten months, still, there's a really long way to go.

What's your vision of benchmarks?

What's your image of what will actually indicate to you?

I think we're reaching the tipping point.

I do think that we're beginning to change the conversation.

So thank you for that.

So Grandparents Vaccines wants to have these conversations go on in every city, town and village in the United States.

We've reached about 75, 80 cities.

We've done about as much as a group of volunteers can do.

Thanks to the Mount Sinai Foundation, we've been able to hire a nationally prominent executive director, media consultant, Jane Ward, who's here fundraising consultant.

And what we're doing is we're raising money now to hire staff to be able to support an organization that has these conversations in every city, town and village.

So we're going to be appearing in local media all over the country.

We're going to get national coverage.

We've had national coverage already in the first ten months.

A lot more of that.

Our social media engine has already taken off one of our TikTok videos.

One of these stories I was telling you about has been viewed by over 100,000 people already in the last month or so, but we want to expand this out to the whole country.

There's over 3000 counties we want to be in, all of them.

Kiger County has been a model for us.

I mentioned the National Council of Negro Women, National Association, evangelicals.

The county Board of Health has connections to community organizations that go back over a century.

And so this is the reality in every one of our hamlets, towns, villages and cities, we have the ability to connect with people.

And what we're finding is we're ever we go.

Without exception.

The response has been widely enthusiastic, so we just need the resources and wherewithal to be able to manage thousands of events over the course of the next several years.

Thanks to Mount Sinai, we've begun having the resources to do that.

We have a goal to greatly expand that now, so your support would be important for that, but also your participation.

And, you know, the person who came forward with the story.

As a polio pioneer, we'd love to connect with you and and have your story part of our story as well.

So everyone here has stories to share.

And that's going to be a big piece of our vision as well.

If we overwhelm the country with the stories of protection, I think the needle will move.

Yes, please.

as a local public health epidemiologist, how do I communicate risk and uncertainty without undermining confidence in vaccination?

And sometimes when vaccines are so-called rapidly produced, like we saw during Covid times, how do we still keep up the confidence in vaccines?

So this is a great question.

They're all wonderful questions.

Thank you for that.

This reminds me of a story.

Strangely enough, we presented grandparents vaccines in Arizona last month.

And I have to tell you, one of the great treasures of that experience was we heard the presentation from the representatives of the Navajo Nation of their perspectives on vaccines.

Let me tell you, I learned so much from them.

And we're working with them now because this is very interesting.

In the Navajo Nation, it's a matrilineal organization, organized society.

And so the stories of the matriarchs of the grandmothers dominate how the nation conducts its thinking and its policies.

And so the grandmothers and Grandfathers Navajo Nation continued telling their stories about having polio, about having measles in our culture.

Once those diseases were wiped out, we didn't see much point to continue telling those stories.

We like to say vaccines not only erase disease, they erase memory.

But not in the Navajo Nation.

And vaccination rates are much higher there than in our culture, directly attributable to the idea that these stories, the narratives of what actually happened, dominate and define their policy so that when misinformation hits their airwaves, that's not my that's not what my grandmother said.

So the way to build confidence is to promote the stories and make the stories that count be the dominant ones, and that's what we're working to do.

Thank you.

Yes, please.

Hi, my name is Doctor Lauren Bean.

I'm a general pediatrician and friend of Doctor Lavin.

I have a question, and this is a question that could be answered by by both of you.

And I would love to know, especially maybe even from Doctor Salks point of view, how when you have somebody who is vaccine hesitant, whether it's a parent.

So I know Doctor Lavin and I have had a lot of conversations with vaccine hesitant parents, and I know there are a ton of doctors in here and a lot of doctors listening, but I would love to hear if you have any words of wisdom for us when we're having that one on one conversation with a a mother or a father of a child who is scared that a vaccine, you know, might harm their child, when you know that that's the opposite.

I think this is an extremely complex situation, and each person as a physician needs to have several things in their armamentarium.

One is listening to the person that you're talking with to understand where their concerns are.

Another thing is knowing the facts of the matter in terms of what are the risks that are there, and then somehow having the ability and we just had a conversation about that earlier today or yesterday, to to strike the right balance, to to resonate with what the concerns are and bring options to the table that can be considered it.

So I'm thinking now about the even the international conversations that have to do with polio vaccination.

There's an attempt to eradicate polio globally, and at times there's been an effort to hush up some of the issues that have come about with a live oral polio vaccine that's been in use.

And there are some real dangers with that, and you can't hush them up.

You really have to be open about things with people.

So the fundamental issue with this question to me is it's going to take personal.

I don't have the answer here in a sense, but it's going to take personal skill and resiliency to be able to appreciate what the questions are and bring a wide range of of one's own knowledge to the table to provide options.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So doctor been raised a tough question.

Grandparents vaccines isn't so involved with what doctors say.

We're more involved with grandparents.

Say for the doctors though, I really have to tip my hat off to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

They're working with a group called frameworks.

And a good thing that's coming out of all these challenges is that the profession is taking very seriously.

The idea of responding to questions and frameworks is working very carefully and deeply with the American cancer.

Just your question.

On the grandparents side, our job is a lot easier because we're not giving the shots.

I'm not giving them as a grandfather.

And and so our message is a little easier to to share with people.

I think it's a little more challenging as a physician.

My name is Eric Shapiro, I'm Eric.

I'm a recently retired physician, also here on behalf of the Academy of Medicine, which I'm happy to say was part of the public rollout of the of the vaccine in the 50s.

And my question is a little bit related to the answer that doctor gave, which is that as somebody who, like many of us, was shocked by the resistance to the vaccine that we saw from some people, but has also seen this unfold over several years.

My question for us, really, those of us who were trying to help to get this idea across to people, is what we may have done wrong in terms of contributing to the mistrust that the people who are opposed to vaccines have happen, and maybe not.

I mean, maybe we were sort of innocent victims in this in an attempt to slander this idea, but I wonder if there are any mistakes that we made in terms of how we have communicated about the vaccine and other public health measures that might have contributed to the opposition.

You know, I think I don't know if mistakes the right word, but contrasting Western culture and the Navajo Nation culture.

I don't think anyone sat down in, let's say, 1980, when a lot of these diseases were vanquished and said, you know, I think a good idea would be to stop talking about these things.

It sort of happened naturally.

It wasn't a decision on anyone's part.

And so I know myself and I think most parents would say my generation, we didn't really talk to our kids so much about what it used to be like because we thought it was over.

We thought polio, I mean, smallpox is over.

You haven't heard us say a word about smallpox today, because outside of a couple labs from a couple of countries, the virus doesn't exist anymore, and so we don't have to worry about it coming back.

I think we really felt as though polio, measles, meningitis were in going in that direction.

I think we would have been better served to continue the stories, so that people knew that, that the nature of the threat that was averted.

And I think.

What I've realized is that it seems as though there's about a generational memory of about 80 years, 50 to 80 years, and then things begin to fade unless you find some way to continue the story.

So so I don't know if that's a mistake.

I think if we go back in a time machine, we might say, hey, wait a minute.

Let's do this a little differently.

But I think that's what really set the stage.

And then there's all sorts of sort of political events that fuel human action, all sorts of directions, that very unpredictable.

But again, our focus grandparents vaccines, the power we have not just as grandparents, but as grandchildren, as everybody together is to change that national conversation, to correct, correct that misdirection, if you will, or that or a cultural thing that happened when we thought we had vanquished it, when we should have known better and realized we needed to keep our guard up.

Again, it's such a complicated issue when there are problems that are real and in some way need to be addressed and confronted.

I know from my own side, when the Covid vaccine came out, I had I had been so frightened about what was taking place.

There was just no, no way of protecting oneself.

And so it was such a great relief to me personally.

Finally, there's something that I can relax about.

And it became became apparent that, you know, on some occasions the Covid vaccine does produce real existing effects that are that are detrimental.

How does how does one deal with it?

It was it was a dentist that was talking to us just.

Oh yeah.

Last night, last night about presenting to a parent.

What are the options?

Your child has this situation that needs to be dealt with in this way.

There's a possibility of using this kind of anesthetic or nitrous oxide or this, that and that approach of engaging in conversations where it's clear there are there can be some problems here and how as a collective now, your child, you, me as a physician or a dentist, how do we choose the best course?

So somehow we've this is real.

We have to deal with these issues and can't pretend they don't exist, and find the best way we possibly can to create a balance where individuals can participate.

The physician, the physician participate.

Everyone in the society participates to come up with an appropriate solution.

I want to say one more thing, just in terms of my own experience as a parent.

And that was back however many decades it was, when son is now, in his early early 40s, and there was a question of getting the diphtheria pertussis tetanus vaccine.

This was at a point when the with the whole wholesale pertussis vaccine, there were a lot of side effects to that for protection against whooping cough.

And there was a real decision to face here.

What do we do in the face of the fact that there can be high fevers and seizures, or what?

Or what have you, after the pertussis vaccination?

Do we give the vaccine to our son or do we not?

And the only I there wasn't very much thought on my part about this because people can make that decision.

Oh, you know, the cure is worse than the disease at this point when there isn't any pertussis around.

All I knew from my own self is, we can't not do this.

We cannot.

Leave our son because the vaccine might have these side effects.

We don't only have a responsibility to him, we have a responsibility to the society around us.

So that's just another ingredient.

Thank you.

Doctor and doctor Arthur Lavin, thank you so much for joining us at the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programing here.

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Our form is adjourned.

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