From the first vaccine (for smallpox) the questions have been the same. How do we transport it? Who's next to get it? Why so much hesitancy? The answers can be similar — or dramatically different.

This isn't the first big vaccine rollout, and the past holds lessons for the pandemic present. Here's a look at how the polio vaccine overcame U.S. hesitancy.

The pandemic has slowed efforts to eradicate the contagious disease. Yet the country's polio effort offers insights on the launch of its coronavirus vaccine campaign.

It looked as if polio would be the second human disease to be eliminated — after smallpox. But "2020 has been a terrible year," the head of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative says.

The Kick Polio Out of Africa Campaign began in 1996. This week, the World Health Organization announced that wild polio has been eradicated — although there is a caveat.

A summer without trips to the beach or Saturdays at the pool might be hard to imagine, but it wouldn’t be the first time an epidemic shut down American...