HERD IMMUNITY A FOCUS FOR ROTARY FOR MANY YEARS NOW A FOCUS FOR THE WORLD
Greetings to everyone for 2021! A year ago, to many in this world, Rotary working on polio eradication seemed a bit irrelevant. We were working to provide vaccines to families who did not see their importance. We developed and maintained cold chains to deliver vaccines in over 100 countries. We sought national leaders to provide internal funding and external resources to countries that were unable to garner resources for public health.
As I look at the whirlwind of this past year, I am reminded of the biblical saying, “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Rotary and our partners have worked for over 40 years to eradicate polio always referring to our activity within Rotary as PolioPlus. Thus in 2020, our PolioPlus network was fully engaged in providing surveillance to keep the coronavirus pandemic in check. Our laboratories provided testing capabilities that otherwise would have been missing. Polio funded personnel provided education on safe distancing, masking, and hand hygiene. The importance of having a cold chain and personnel maintaining it was not something new to be learned as we were already doing it. Herd immunity has been a focus for us for many years and now it is a focus for the world. The need to work with international public and private partners to address public health issues was largely a Rotary inspired movement when we asked WHO, UNICEF and the US Centres for Disease Control to work with us on polio in the mid 1980’s.
We did all the “plus” activities as a moral imperative to address the public health challenge of our time. But Rotarians did not take our eyes off eradicating polio. Rotarians, clubs, and districts met the polio goal of raising US$ 50 million. The number of wild polio cases in 2020 will be slightly less than the number in 2019 with a marked drop over the last six months of the year. The AFRO region of the World Health Organization was certified as free of the wild polio virus. A new oral polio vaccine was given initial use approval by the WHO thus providing a needed response to an outbreak of vaccine derived polio cases. And this month, India is marking 10 years without a case of wild polio virus.
I have never been prouder to be a Rotarian knowing how important our work has contributed to responding to the pandemic, in moving toward a polio free world and in continuing to provide so many other contributions through our Foundation and to our communities.
As we look at 2021, I think of the poem Ulysses from Alfred Lord Tennyson and paraphrasing his concluding line, “we are strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” All that we do to strive for and seek a polio free world is relevant and we will not yield until the vision is accomplished.
Thank you for your continuing service above self.
Mike McGovern
Chair, Rotary International PolioPlus Committee
