The Polio vaccine brought people freedom from one of the worst childhood cripplers known to mankind.
My late husband suffered greatly as a child after polio turned one of his hands into a withered part, and bullies in high school beat him up on account of how he looked to them. They hit him hard on his head leaving a lifelong lump which resulted in a kind of late-in-life dementia no one should ever have to suffer because where the injury was, the brain begins to deteriorate and fall away from the skull as one ages. By the time he was 65, he was starting to be confused about taking the wrong turn frequently, and by the time he was 68, he couldn't remember people he worked with including his secretary of 25 years and the friend who introduced us to each other. He died at the age of 74 with a perfect body, but a mind that couldn't control anything in his life because as it tore away bit by bit, he lost a memory here, a function there, and they never came back. Not ever.
There is absolutely nothing good about polio, and the vaccine I took years before we met made me able to do things he could not do, and he could think things through and blessed us with a marriage built on his great wisdom that I was happy to enjoy for 44 years of what was the remainder of his beautiful, caring life.
That no one really ever had to worry much about going swimming in a public pool in the summer after being protected by that vaccine, initially taken on a lump of sugar gave those who got the disease before the vaccine came out glad no one else would have to go through what they experienced as youngsters. The same day he came down with polio, 5 or 6 other kids who went swimming the same day also came down with polio. It was a 100% communicable disease, and before the Salk vaccines, hundreds of thousands of American kids had something in their body that was really screwed up. Some of the worst deformities were internal and resulted in death, particularly if their lungs and/or neural pathways were stricken. Most of the time, all you knew about a missing friend of the school year before, was that he or she was no longer around, and you missed him or her.