“I don’t want people to ever forget how vaccines continue to save generations across the globe from polio.” Ina’s Story - from Shotbyshot.org

Who knew that traveling between each other’s homes would bring two survivors together in such a meaningful way.

“I was always the outsider,” she said. “I was always the kid that ate alone.” Other kids referred to her as the “crippled girl.” Leana S. Wen for the Washington Post

A fear of the unknown. The need to maintain an appropriate distance. An urgent desire to find a cure or vaccine. They're the hallmarks of the coronavirus pandemic, but they also characterized an earlier epidemic: when paralysis-causing polio ravaged the U.S. in the 1940s and '50s.

Ina Pinkney was infected in 1944, during World War II, more than a decade before the Salk Vaccine became available, stemming the annual summer epidemics that paralyzed communities almost like it paralyzed children.