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For McConnell, Virus Carries Echo of His Boyhood Polio

Associated Press

   WASHINGTON - Mitch McConnell's earliest childhood memory is the day he
   left the polio treatment center at Warm Springs, Ga., for the last
   time.

   He was just a toddler in 1944, when his father was deployed to World
   War II, his mother relocated the family to her sister's home in rural
   Alabama and he came down with flu-like symptoms. While he eventually
   recovered, his left leg did not. It was paralyzed.

   Two long years later, after shuttling young McConnell to and from the
   center where then-President Franklin Roosevelt received polio care, his
   mother was told that day that her young son would be able walk into his
   life without a leg brace.

   She immediately took the 4-year-old shopping for a new pair of shoes.

   More than 70 years later, Senate Majority Leader McConnell walked into
   the U.S. Senate to pass a sweeping coronavirus rescue package -- and
   shutter the chamber for the foreseeable future -- as another dangerous
   flu-like virus fills the nation with anxiety, quarantines and
   unimaginable disruptions to American life.

   "Why does this current pandemic remind me of that? I think No. 1 is the
   fear," said McConnell in an interview with The Associated Press.

   "And the uncertainty you have when there's no pathway forward on either
   treatment or a vaccine and that was the situation largely in polio
   before 1954."

   The two crises now bookend McConnell's years, making the Kentucky
   Republican an unexpected voice of personal experience and reflection in
   what he calls these "eerie" times.

   It's an unusual role for the famously guarded leader, who rarely says
   more when less will do, and relishes an image as a sly political
   tactician. But as more than 16,000 people in the U.S. have died from
   coronavirus, the echoes are all too familiar. So too is the solution,
   as he sees it, to care for the nation's sick and produce treatments,
   and an eventual vaccine.

   "There's hope that we're going to get on top of this disease," he said,
   "within a year, year and a half."

   The polio epidemic

   Polio ignited a dreadful fear across the U.S. in those years,
   especially in summertime. The virus particularly struck children,
   forcing swift closures of schools and playgrounds and, in the
   sweltering heat, swimming pools. Towns shuttered, families isolated.
   Thousands died, others were hospitalized and some left permanently
   paralyzed or with post-polio syndrome. The Salk vaccine was still years
   away.

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