I am responding to the letter, “Salk vaccine was widely accepted,” from the Aug. 8 issue.

I could have been one of the kids the writer mentioned seeing on Pittsburgh TV in the 1950s. At the age of five, I was one of the 60,000 people who got polio in 1952, the last major epidemic year in the U.S.

I spent the next two years in recovery and rehab, leaving me with a paralyzed right leg and partially paralyzed left leg.

Polio is a vaccine-preventable disease. When the Salk vaccine was approved in 1955, my family was one of the first from Butler County to be given the vaccine by Dr. Salk at the D.T. Watson Home in Sewickley. My dad volunteered my family to be part of a follow-up study to be monitored by Salk.

We would return to the Watson Home annually for five years to have blood drawn to determine if the polio vaccine antibody was maintained in our bodies.

I have suffered from the aftereffects of polio for the last 69 years, and I am faced with new challenges every day.

No one knows how long the effects of COVID-19 will last. Therefore, it saddens and disappoints me every day to see and hear constant reports of people stating that they will never get the vaccine and to hear government officials refusing to encourage citizens to wear masks or overruling school districts who mandate that children be masked.

Before COVID-19 vaccines became available, I had friends who got very sick and some of them died.

COVID-19 is a vaccine-preventable disease. I encourage everyone to get the vaccine and to get their children vaccinated when it becomes available for them, and please wear a mask.