On an August morning in 1949, when I was six, I got out of bed and collapsed on the floor. By evening, I was paralyzed from the neck down and in an iron lung. I spent the next five months in a polio ward with 200 children, experiencing painful hot pack treatments and unfortunate neglect because of a post-WWII nurse shortage. That year, there were 42,173 reported cases of polio in the U.S. and 2,720 deaths, and it was the first year of a five-year epidemic that killed or paralyzed 500,000 people globally each year. It was not until 1955 that the Salk vaccine became available to the public. For me, though, the scourge of polio was not over, and I underwent corrective surgeries and spent many more months in hospitals in the ensuing years. Today, 75 years later, I wear a leg brace and continue to live with the aftereffects.

Since 2016, I have tried in various ways to inform people on social media and in the press about the importance of vaccinating their children and themselves. In response, I’ve been told I’m a liar and that I never had polio, that I’m a shill for big pharma, that I must have been sprayed with DDT to get polio, that I grew up in a ”too sanitary” household, or that it was the polio vaccine that gave me polio. One antivaxxer reminded me, ”Now you’ve got natural immunity, which is even better than the vaccine.” Other antivaxxers say that the polio vaccine is ”different” because it was thoroughly researched and that other vaccines haven’t received the same scrutiny, which is untrue.

When I learned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a notorious vaccine skeptic, was President Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it took my breath away. This is the person who is on record as saying that ”people ought to have a choice” about whether to vaccinate their children. He may as well have given tacit permission to countless numbers of vaccine-hesitant parents to go ahead and skip at least some vaccines.

Thanks to fear-based propaganda from a confusing mishmash of unproven theories about the so-called damage caused by vaccines, there are swaths of the U.S. where the percentage of children who need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity in certain diseases is dangerously low. For measles, which is highly contagious and can lead to complications including hearing loss, pneumonia and encephalitis, the herd immunity rate is 95%. As we have recently learned, Aaron Siri, Kennedy’s personal lawyer, asked the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine because it had not been tested against placebos in double-blind clinical trials. Given the risks of polio causing paralysis and killing people, this kind of testing would be unethical.

Today, many people haven’t seen the diseases that vaccines prevent, which makes it easier to dismiss the idea that one of them could strike a family member. There were no two people more surprised than my own parents when I was diagnosed, since there were no other reported polio cases in the area. While we can hope that polio doesn’t strike the U.S. again, there are many other vaccine-preventable diseases that are still present in this country because of parents, vaccinated themselves as children, are not extending the same privilege to their offspring.

I do not claim any medical expertise or special knowledge other than my personal experience in suffering what is now a vaccine-preventable disease, but I can only hope that those who are in doubt will do more research before deciding against vaccinating.

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Judith Shaw Beatty lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has written pieces that have appeared in HuffPost, the Santa Fe New Mexican, Vaccinate Your Family, Polio Network and other publications. This commentary originally ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican.