In 1979, Rotary Club members in the Philippines rolled up their sleeves and vaccinated six million children against polio. It was a local project with a wild ambition behind it: what if we didn’t just protect a few thousand kids, but ended polio everywhere, for good?
Nobody had ever eradicated a human disease from the face of the earth except smallpox, and that had taken the resources of entire governments. Rotary was a volunteer service organization. And yet, in 1988, Rotary co-founded the Global Polio Eradication Initiative alongside the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — later joined by the Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. That year, polio was paralyzing an estimated 350,000 children annually, in 125 countries, on every inhabited continent.
Just let that sink in for a moment: Almost a thousand children every day contracting the deadly, debilitating disease of polio in 125 countries.
Medford Sunrise Rotary members have been at the forefront of PolioPlus since the campaign began, and we have organized several teams of volunteers—including non-Rotary member volunteers—to India on immunization trips. On several of those, the national immunization group placed 2 drops of polio vaccine into the mouths of 172 million children in a two-day period.
One hundred seventy-two million children who will never be stricken with polio.
Here’s where we stand today.
Wild poliovirus is now endemic in exactly two countries on Earth: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Two. Down from 125. Since Rotary’s PolioPlus campaign began, global polio cases have dropped by more than 99.9 percent, and an estimated 20 million people are walking today who would otherwise have been paralyzed. Smallpox took the entire world twelve years to defeat after eradication became the official goal. Rotary and its partners have spent nearly four decades on polio, because the last mile of any eradication effort is always the hardest — it means reaching children in conflict zones, in remote mountain villages, in communities that vaccination teams have never been able to safely enter before.
That last mile is exactly where Rotary has kept showing up. Earlier this year, Rotary International committed nearly $10 million to the World Health Organization’s Pakistan operations, helping fund a campaign to protect more than 27 million children in the country’s highest-risk districts. It’s the kind of unglamorous, unrelenting work that doesn’t make headlines but makes the difference — door-to-door vaccination drives, cold-chain logistics to keep vaccines viable in 100-degree heat, and local health workers who know which households to visit and which elders to talk to first.
Rotary has now contributed more than $3 billion to this fight, and that number undersells the real story. It’s not just money. It’s the hundreds of thousands of Rotarians worldwide — including right here in our own Medford Sunrise club — who have spent decades keeping polio on the world’s agenda when it would have been easy to let it slide off. Every dollar Rotary raises for PolioPlus is matched 2-to-1 by the Gates Foundation, which means a $100 contribution becomes $300 of vaccine, cold storage, and boots on the ground.
Why this matters to you.
So if you would like to make a donation of any amount to help us finish this campaign, you, too, for only the second time in human history, will be playing a part in eradicating a deadly disease from the planet. That’s not abstract global citizenship. That’s a direct, traceable line between you and a child in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who will walk instead of never walking again.
We are close. Not “close” in the way campaigns often claim to be close, but close in the way that public health experts actually mean it: two countries, a few dozen cases a year, and a known, funded plan to close the remaining gaps. The finish line has been visible for years now. What’s kept it just out of reach isn’t science — the vaccine works, and has worked for seventy years — it’s the last stretch of access, trust, and funding in the hardest places to reach.
That’s the stretch Rotary was built for. We’re not a government. We don’t have an army or a treasury. What we have is a century of showing up, community by community, club by club, until the job is done. Polio will be the second human disease ever eradicated, and when historians write that story, they will write Rotary into it — not as a footnote, but as the organization that refused to let the world declare victory too early and quietly walk away.
Join us, and you join that story too. It’s still being written, and it needs its ending.
Interested in learning more about Rotary’s End Polio Now campaign, or about joining Medford Sunrise Rotary? Reach out to David @ Rotary@DaveForward.com or stop by any Wednesday morning, 7:15 a.m. at Studio 67, 67 N. Main Street, 2nd Floor, Medford, NJ 08055, or visit us online.