Vaccines Are a Blessing. Let’s Not Forget Why

The sun came through a bedroom window in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and a five year old girl could not lift her head off the pillow.

“I woke up and it was sunny outside, and I started to sit up, and my neck was killing me,” Martha Ann Lillard recalled.

It was June 1953. She had turned five that same month.

Four days later she was unconscious. “I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move my arms or legs.”

The first polio vaccine was still two years from being licensed in the United States. Her body was already losing an argument with a virus most Americans alive today have never had to think about.

What doctors did for her in the weeks after that sunny morning kept her breathing for another seventy three years. It also made her the last of her kind in this country.

The Machine That Breathed For Her

They sealed her body inside a steel cylinder and left her head sticking out one end.

An iron lung is not a ventilator. It does not push air down your throat. A motorized bellows drops the air pressure inside the sealed tube so your chest expands, then raises it so your chest falls.

The machine does not help you breathe. It breathes you.

Martha spent six months in the hospital, twenty three hours a day inside it, teaching her lungs to take back a little of the work.

Therapy gave her back her legs and partial movement in her left arm. That was her range of motion for the rest of her life.

Every night after that, she slept in the machine. Trapped inside it during an ice storm once, she said it felt “like being buried alive almost, you know, it’s so scary.”

And still she stayed. “That’s what keeps me healthy. That’s what heals me. That’s what allows me to breathe the next day.”

The Girl Who Was Not Supposed To See Twenty

“They told her she wasn’t supposed to live past 20 years old,” her sister Cindy McVey told the Associated Press. “She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living.”

She got fifty eight more years than that, one of those sentences a family watches get proven wrong.

She finished high school over an intercom line piped into her bedroom, with tutors two hours a day. She learned to drive. She lived on her own for years. She wrote poems and songs and volunteered with the Humane Society.

More than twenty years ago she met a man named Baha Salh online. In February 2026, at 77, she married him. “They were really soul mates,” McVey said.

Ask her sister what it was like growing up beside a steel cylinder that hummed all night, and the answer comes back in five words. “To me, it was just normal.”

Nothing Modern Could Do What 1940s Bellows Did

Most polio survivors who still needed breathing help eventually moved to smaller, quieter machines. Martha tried.

“I tried all of them,” she said. None of them gave her what she needed.

So she kept the iron lung, and the iron lung kept getting older. “Some of the parts are from … the 1940s, and they’re hard to locate,” McVey explained. “We have a spare motor, but we don’t have anyone to put it back in if we needed it.”

A tornado took out her power. Her husband breathed for her, mouth to mouth, until help came.

Then COVID found her twice. Her lung capacity was already down to roughly a quarter of normal, and after that she needed the chamber nearly around the clock.

She died on June 26, 2026, at 78. Her death certificate lists chronic pulmonary failure and post polio syndrome.

When America Counted Its Paralyzed Children

This is the part that has quietly fallen out of the national memory.

Through the 1950s the United States recorded roughly 15,000 cases of polio paralysis a year. At the 1952 peak the country logged nearly 58,000 cases. More than 3,000 people died. Around 21,000 were left at least partly paralyzed.

Every one of those numbers was somebody’s five year old.

Then Jonas Salk’s vaccine was licensed on April 12, 1955. By 1957 the annual count had fallen below 5,500. By the 1960s it was under 100. In 1979 polio was declared eliminated in the United States.

That is the only reason Martha was the last one. Not because the machines got better. Because the disease stopped arriving.

The Strange Price of Winning

Emergency physician Dr. Ashely Alker put the worry directly in the title of her Washington Post essay: what could die with the last person using an iron lung.

The scale of what she is pointing at is measurable. A 2024 study in The Lancet00850-X/fulltext) found that global immunization programs have saved at least 154 million lives over fifty years. About 101 million of those were infants under one year old.

You cannot photograph 154 million people who did not die. There is no ward full of them, no machine, no picture that makes a grandparent flinch. The proof of the win is invisible, and invisible proof is the easiest kind to argue with.

What The Numbers Are Doing Now

Coverage is slipping. Polio vaccination among American kindergartners fell to 92.5 percent in the 2024 to 2025 school year, down from 93.1 percent the year before, according to reporting on CDC school data. Two dose measles, mumps and rubella coverage sat at the same 92.5 percent, below the 95 percent at which measles transmission gets interrupted.

Exemptions among kindergartners rose to 3.6 percent from 3.3 percent, with 17 states reporting rates above 5 percent.

Measles followed. States confirmed 2,288 cases in 2025, with 243 hospitalizations and three deaths, and more than 3,800 cases between January 2025 and March 2026. KFF’s read is blunt: if current trends hold, there are grounds for the country to lose its measles elimination status.

None of that means polio is coming back. The United States has been polio free since 1979, and the risk that remains sits in local pockets rather than across the country. It does mean the floor is lower than it used to be.

A Machine Nobody Needs Anymore

Somewhere in Oklahoma there is a steel cylinder built in the 1940s, with a spare motor beside it and nobody left who knows how to fit it.

McVey said it through tears. “But since she’s the last one, we don’t need that anymore.”

Both halves of that sentence are true, and they pull against each other. A woman is gone. An entire category of American childhood suffering went out the door with her.

Martha Lillard breathed for 78 years on 1940s machinery and pure stubbornness. She wrote songs. She fell in love. She got married at 77. Every one of those years was borrowed back from a virus, and she spent them like they were hers.

That is what a vaccine buys, and it buys it so quietly that we forget to be astonished. The blessing was never only that she survived. The blessing is that she was the last American who had to.