Both Things Are True

Evan Swensen
May 9, 2026

Cedar Valley News
May 9, 2026
Both Things Are True
By Aisha Khalid

Tom wrote to me last Saturday after my column on polio.

I have been thinking about his letter for a week.

He told me what he believed. Polio cases were already declining before the vaccine. Cases rose afterward. Children were harmed. The historical record has been scrubbed from the internet. He signed his name.

I owe him an answer. I owe every reader of this paper an answer.

The Cutter Incident is real. In 1955, Cutter Laboratories shipped about 120,000 doses of polio vaccine containing live, unattenuated virus due to a manufacturing failure. Two hundred children were permanently paralyzed. Ten died. One hundred thirteen of their contacts were also paralyzed; five more died. Sixty lawsuits followed. None of those children got their legs back. The harm is on the record. I do not pretend it is not.

SV40 contamination is real. Between 1955 and 1963, ten to thirty percent of the polio vaccine produced in this country was contaminated with simian virus 40 from monkey kidney cell cultures. Ten to one hundred million Americans were exposed. The Institute of Medicine concluded that the evidence on human cancer is insufficient to accept or reject a causal link. The question is open. I do not pretend it is closed.

Vaccine-derived poliovirus is real. The oral vaccine, used in this country until 2000, was a live virus capable of reverting to virulence. Between January 2023 and June 2024, the CDC recorded 74 such outbreaks worldwide, with 672 paralytic cases across 39 countries. Today, more paralytic polio cases worldwide come from vaccine-derived strains than from wild virus.

The COVID-19 mRNA myocarditis signal is real. The CDC officially acknowledges a causal association, especially in young men, after the second dose, with roughly 5 to 10 cases per million doses.

I am a physician. I have practiced for twenty years. I am not in the business of pretending. The history of medicine contains real failures. The children harmed by those failures are not numbers to me.

Now let me tell you what the record does not support.

In 1952, before the vaccine, the United States recorded more than twenty-one thousand paralytic polio cases. Three years after the vaccine, the number was about five thousand. By 1965 it was sixty-one. The drop is not the continuation of an earlier decline. It is a ninety-nine percent collapse following the introduction of the vaccine. Tom believes the cases were already falling. The CDC’s own published data show otherwise.

The data are not scrubbed. The CDC publishes them. The World Health Organization publishes them. The Cutter Incident has its own page. SV40 has its own page. Vaccine-derived polio has its own page. The COVID myocarditis signal has its own page. The story Tom believes has been hidden is the story public health institutions tell, openly, about themselves.

Both things are true. The vaccines have failed in real and terrible ways. The vaccines have also ended a disease paralyzing twenty thousand American children a year. A serious adult does not have to choose. A physician cannot choose. I sit with both, every morning, before I open the clinic door.

I do my work now knowing Cutter, and SV40, and vaccine-derived polio, and the myocarditis signal, and I do it anyway, because the alternative is the curve I read in the CDC’s own numbers.

Tom, I am not going to convince you. I am not trying to. You have your own mind, and you are entitled to use it. What I am asking is what I would ask any patient who has read something frightening. Read the record yourself. Read the CDC pages. Read the Institute of Medicine. Read the court documents. The institutions are not hiding the Cutter children. They are not hiding SV40. They are telling the story you think has been suppressed. Read it before you decide.

Tom, you wrote me a letter. The door is open if you want to write again. So is the door for any reader who has been thinking about this. The porch is for the conversation.

Walk down to the clinic on Monday and tell me what you think.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us what your own reading of the record has shown you. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the Cutter Incident, SV40 contamination, vaccine-derived poliovirus, the COVID-19 mRNA myocarditis signal, the cited CDC and Institute of Medicine findings, and the historical case-count data are real.