For McConnell, virus carries echo of his boyhood polio

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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. He was stricken with polio. His earliest memory is of leaving the polio treatment facility at Warm Springs, Ga., as his mother is told he will be able to walk without a leg brace. “I was lucky,” he said. The two crises now bookend McConnell’s years, making the Kentucky Republican an unexpected voice of personal reflection. “Why does this current pandemic remind me of that? I think No. 1 is the fear,” he told The Associated Press. The echoes are familiar, but he says, so too is the solution of an eventual vaccine. “We’re going to get that relief,” he said.