As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flashes back to an earlier crisis that gripped the nation, and his own life, when he was a boy. McConnell was stricken with polio.
His earliest memory is of leaving a Georgia polio treatment facility as his mother is told he'll be able to walk without a leg brace. He says he “was lucky.”
The two crises now bookend McConnell’s years, making the Kentucky Republican an unexpected voice of personal reflection. McConnell told The Associated Press “fear” is why this current pandemic reminds him of that one.
The echoes are familiar, but McConnell says so is the solution of an eventual vaccine.
