Vaccinated seniors navigate life in mostly unvaccinated rural America
Vaccination rates in much of rural America remain low. But there's one consistent holdout demographic: seniors, many of whom remember lining up eagerly as children to get the polio vaccine.
For Marge Loennig, 87, the Covid-19 pandemic has stirred up many old memories. The most vivid is of a childhood friend who was stricken with polio.
Loennig remembers reading to her while she lay in an iron lung ventilator.
"Her arms and her lower body were all in the lung," she recalls. "It was very frightening for her and very frightening for us."
Back then, everyone seemed to know someone with the disease, and when the vaccine became available Loennig remembers people eagerly lining up to get it. Today, she believes Covid is still being downplayed, its deaths and illnesses underreported. Today the laws are also different and health officials are prevented from being as open about who is sick and who
