The virus was awful in children
As a little kid, the iron lung terrified me. TV would show little kids lying on their backs with a tilted mirror to see the world bravely reading propped up books, turning the pages with stick in their mouths. March of Dimes even had little iron lung banks to put your dimes in.
My mom told me she was terrified of contracting to polio as a child. During the height of the epidemic, she would have been 6 or 7. If that wasn’t bad enough, that generation of kids moved on to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 62. Pretty scary time to be alive.