Sir John Bell’s first memory is of looking up “and seeing a load of guys with white coats around me”. The regius professor of medicine at Oxford contracted polio as a baby in the winter of 1952 in Canada. His father, a physician who ran the clinical lab, also caught the disease and was critically ill in the same hospital. “People forget about polio,” says Professor Bell, who advises the UK’s vaccine task force. “It’s because we’ve got the vaccine now, but I spent a year in hospital with polio when I was a child and in every class in Canada there were kids with callipers and legs that didn’t work. My father spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He was a
SATURDAY INTERVIEW
‘The NHS could vaccinate everybody in five days if it were better motivated’
Doctors are battling brilliantly but bureaucracy is letting them down, the Oxford professor Sir John Bell says
Sir John Bell suffered polio as a child before the vaccine could be introduced. I was lucky to come out unscathed, he says
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The Times
