The vaccine that was the flower among the weird weeds

Polio has finally been eradicated from Africa. Picture: AFP

Is it possible the world is getting weirder? It certainly looks like it.

Kim Jong-un may be dead again if we believed reports earlier in the week. He’s fine by the way although he has given more power to his sister, Kim Yo Jong, in an admirable push for equal opportunity state sponsored mass murder and oppression.

Senator Richard Colbeck has been retained as Aged Care Minister in the Morrison government thus bringing a gleam to the eye of shiftless employees everywhere. Same salary, same perks only now he doesn’t have to do anything hard. His job description has been amended to take out any pesky duties which require some substance, effort and thought. Half his luck, eh?

Meanwhile in Victoria, it is possible to be a financial member of both major political parties without ever having to pay for it. Now that’s bipartisanship. It really doesn’t matter where you live. In the Locked Down state, piffling details like your place of residence matter little. You live where the major parties would like you to live.

Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck. Picture: Sean Davey

If you please Victorian Labor, there’s a nice cushy job in an electoral office waiting for you. If you please the Victorian Libs, you could end up singing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. If your singing voice is of the fingernails dragging down a blackboard type, no worries, just mime along and hope that no one notices.

Over the last two weeks our senses have been assaulted by the Democratic and Republican parties’ national conventions. Now these rah-rah shindigs normally don’t count for much at all in terms of a voting determinant. The great swath of independent voters in the US who decide outcomes couldn’t care less. In these days of pandemic, the conventions have become even weirder. Last week’s effort and the one this week resembled orthodontists’ seminars (so many perfect sets of choppers) who’d decided to hire the Church of Scientology as events manager.

But by far the weirdest episode of the week goes to Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell Jr resigned this week as President of Liberty University and then withdrew his resignation only to offer it again where it was happily accepted by the board of the evangelical university.

Falwell Jr and his wife, Becki were accused of extramarital dalliances where Becki enjoyed the attention of a younger man while the evangelist sat in the corner and watched.

You know what they say, it’s always the ones you expect most.

While the click bait is the cuckold fetish the real story may prove to be far more intriguing. In 2015, Falwell sought the assistance of then Trump attorney, Michael Cohen to make some photographs disappear lest they appear in some nasty tabloid rag. Cohen took possession of the photographs or destroyed some or all of them and hey, presto, like magic, Falwell Jr endorsed Donald Trump just days before the Iowa Caucus in 2016.

Jerry Falwell Jr with his wife Becki Falwell. Picture: Getty Images

The Trump connection aside, Falwell Jr joins the cavalcade of evangelists who preach Old Testament wrath for practitioners of extramarital sex in all its many guises but quietly ignore their own terrifying admonitions and get stuck right in.

Or, in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens, “Whenever I hear some big-mouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed on by an Apache transvestite.”

Interestingly, Cohen says he kept a copy of one of said photos. The disbarred lawyer currently serving his three-year jail sentence in home detention and sporting corrective services jewellery on his right ankle, has a tell-all book coming out next month. The only predictable thing here is we can safely say there is more weirdness about the Falwells to come.

Amid this mayhem, there is some good news and it is spectacularly good. Oddly, it has hardly got a mention so let me help you out with it.

On Wednesday, Africa was declared wild polio virus free.

It is a stunning achievement not least of all because it puts the anti-vaxxers firmly in their place once and for all, which is swimming about in the primordial slime as single cell amoeba eating and defecating from the same orifice.

In the 1950s, 600,000 people around the world were paralysed by the poliomyelitis virus every year.

As crazy as the anti-vaxxers are, I’ve never heard one of them demand their basic human rights to be placed in an iron lung.

More importantly, the success of polio eradication efforts highlight their bone-jarring hypocrisy. While they stamp their feet and profess their refusal to allow their kids to take a COVID-19 vaccine when that time comes, the anti-vaxxers are the same people who stood dutifully in line as children, just like you and me, waiting for a spoon or needle full of the polio vaccine.

Mass immunisation in Africa has eradicated polio. Picture: AFP

The last diagnosis of polio in Australia was in 1972. The US became polio free in 1979.

Yet, polio continued to run rampant in Africa. There were promotions pushed by the then World Health Authority. Rotary International has a proud history of financial and logistical support for vaccinating Africa’s children against polio. Yet the vaccine remained out of reach of so many African children. Much of Africa was too dangerous to administer the vaccine en masse.

And so, every year in the 1980s and 1990s, more than 70,000 African children were paralysed with polio and more than 10,000 died from it.

It took the great Nelson Mandela to change that. In 1996, Mandela exhorted every African leader to support the plan to “Kick Polio Out of Africa” complete with soccer balls and the South African President grinning and punting them around for the cameras.

Mandela was the only world leader who had the ear of his African counterparts, some of them vicious dictators. One by one they agreed to allow health workers into their countries to vaccinate children.

The US Centre for Communicable Diseases part funded the vaccination program as did the World Health Organisation. Australian aid payments also assisted the push. The Gates Foundation weighed in with crucial funding.

Twenty-four years is all it took.

The real heroes are the millions of health workers and volunteers who marched from door to door, often in some of the most dangerous parts of the world, to administer the vaccine.

The last known cases of free poliomyelitis virus were in Nigeria in 2017 but there have been none since.

Readers will note the word ‘free’ is used, well, freely. There remain pockets of polio in sub-Saharan Africa where the cheaper form of the vaccine, taken orally, can be discarded in faeces and transmitted in places where there is no safe drinking water.

Direct intervention health teams have been sent into areas where polio continues to be transmitted, albeit from the vaccination itself. We don’t want to give the anti-vaxxers any comfort. It is no surprise that these health teams will go armed with the tools of medical science and engineering, not astonishingly expensive light therapies, handfuls of crystals or bowls of steel cut oats with a little unpasteurised milk poured on top.

In celebrating the announcement made by the World Health Organisation, the CDC quoted what they said was an old African axiom to sum up the success. To be specific, it comes from Zambia but versions of it in one form or another are used throughout the continent: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

And if you want to get weird, take a number and sit quietly. We’re busy at the moment but your call is important to us. Please hold.