Ten years ago, while training as a resident physician, a 22-year-old man in our intensive care unit died of complications of varicella (chicken pox) pneumonia after weeks on a ventilator. He had grown up in the 1980s and had never been vaccinated. I have also taken care of patients who became permanently ventilator dependent as […]

I am 91 years old. I remember that, when I was a child, I had measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough and German measles. Kids were dying of these diseases. Polio was feared. Every summer we saw pictures of children and adults in iron lungs with only their heads outside the big machines that were […]