In the late 1980s, on a school day in early March at Pikesville High School in Baltimore County, classes were suspended for a day. The entire student body was sent to the gymnasium and lined up.

A student at the school had recently returned from a trip abroad and had come down with the measles. The health department acted quickly to stave off an epidemic by deciding on a mass vaccination of the entire student body.

I was a math teacher at Pikesville at the time. To my knowledge, none of the students subsequently came down with the measles. In fact, only one person out of the entire staff and student body came down with the measles. That person was me.

As a child in the late ’40s and early ’50s, I remember the polio outbreak. Like parents all over the country, my mother was frightened that I would come down with polio. She felt I would be safer at a summer camp in New Hampshire.

One summer, when I was about 7 or 8, a camper at the camp actually got polio and was rushed to a Boston hospital, where he later died of the disease. Parents of children attending the camp went into “panic mode.” Many of them jumped into their cars immediately and drove the 12 hours from Baltimore to New Hampshire to snatch their children away from the camp. My own parents, who were already in the area on vacation, packed me into our family car and drove me home.

Later in 1965, at age 21, I was going to spend a summer traveling in Europe. I had to get my first passport. As a condition of getting the passport, I was required to get a smallpox vaccination. I had already gotten a smallpox vaccination as an infant, but international travel rules at that time required an update.

I got my “re-vaccination” without much thought. My passport was then stamped with verification so that I could travel internationally.

For the rest of my life, I have striven to keep my vaccinations updated. Now as a “senior citizen,” I am getting some of the new vaccines (shingles, pneumonia, etc.) as recommended by my physician. So, when the COVID-19 vaccine became available, both my wife and myself, now in our 70s, signed up immediately and got fully vaccinated by late winter.

There have always been “anti-vaxxers.” They are welcome to their opinions and beliefs. But, up until the last year or so, I never remember a lifesaving vaccine being so widely “politicized.” Why has this particular disease suddenly changed the way our health care system works?

Iver Mindel wrote this for The Baltimore Sun.