Short abstract:

While polio vaccination campaigns in London and New York drew on the historical past to sway parents to accept vaccinations, parents and communities were instead concerned by the more recent legacy of Covid-19. This paper explores the entanglement of confidence, vaccines and temporality.

Long abstract:

Recent outbreaks in the global north offer an opportunity to conceive how epidemiological pasts are revived as part of contemporary disease events. In 2022, the United Kingdom Health Security Agency declared a national poliovirus incident and mobilized to vaccinate one million children across London. The spread of polio in London was linked to outbreaks in New and Jerusalem, where Charedi Jewish infants were particularly vulnerable to paralysis due to lower-level vaccination coverage.

Drawing on long term ethnographic research conducted in the UK, this paper explores how the spread of polio was encountered by parents and health professionals in London. The epidemiological past of twentieth-century epidemics was revived in public (health) responses to the spread of poliovirus in London and New York, often through references to sugar cubes, iron lungs, and timelines that narrate the impact of routine childhood immunisations. While memories of polio were widely deployed to provoke an urgency to vaccinate, vulnerable publics instead considered the more recent legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic when deciding whether to trust recommendations and responses.

Critical attention to memory places analysis on the divergences between institutional (public health agencies) and peopled (publics) responses to disease events. The framing of public health memory contributes to anthropological engagement with the temporality of disease outbreaks, particularly when historical and epidemiological pasts are evoked in ways that contrast with the contemporary dilemmas of people and parents.