Freemasons Founding & Funding the Fight Against Polio

Today, few can imagine the fear that struck at the hearts of parents and all Americans when they heard the world “polio”. Until the development of a vaccine by the famous virologist, Dr. Jonas Salk, poliovirus was such a dreaded disease that, according to a Public Broadcasting System documentary, “ The Polio Crusaders" in the early 1950s, a majority of American parents felt that aside from their fears of attack by an atom bomb, their biggest fear was polio.

For decades, the polio virus had hit the country in wave after wave. In the epidemic of 1952, more than 20,000 Americans, most of them children, were left with some level of paralysis and more than 1,300 died of the disease. Polio was spread by person to person through contact through the skin or by ingestion from contaminated food or water. A victim would quickly become sick as the infection entered the spinal cord resulting in paralysis which could prove fatal to this incurable disease.