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I find myself wondering if the opinions of many regarding vaccination of children would change if we were once again confronted with a polio epidemic.

My opinion, that people have a right to choose for themselves whether they want to vaccinate or not, would not change.

The problem is that it isn’t a personal choice. A child can’t make the decision.

Since many outbreaks of polio are currently linked to the vaccine itself, that might not be the best hypothetical card to play.

http://www.cmaj.ca/content/183/18/E1303.full.pdf

In 2005, it was reported that children in a small village in the United States had contracted vaccine-derived polio. In Nigeria, >70 cases have been reported. In 2006, ∼1600 cases of vaccine-induced polio occurred in India, according to the Indian Medical Association Sub-Committee on Immunisation's report on the Polio Eradication Initiative [3]. The point to be noted is that these cases were reported during repeated mass-immunization campaigns in which repeated doses of OPV were administered. In 2008, many cases of polio were reported in all provinces of Pakistan, where OPV is used for repeated mass-immunization campaigns. These vaccine-related cases are big challenge for the scientific community if the polio-eradication goal is to be achieved, and there is a need for prompt action to combat the issue [1–5]...

...The above observations suggest that OPV has lost its effectiveness in providing herd immunity. It seems that children are getting polio from OPV, and it also seems that OPV is proving to be ineffective in stopping polio transmission from another source. Therefore, the whole world—and especially developing countries—should shift from OPV to IPV, in my opinion. There is still a need for active research in exploring various vaccine strategies for polio and to combat adverse effects associated with polio vaccination; otherwise, the dream of polio eradication will never come true [2–4].

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/49/8/1287.full

Nineteen outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived polio virus(cVDPV) have been documented in that same period, resulting in 536 cases in some 17 countries, the majority in Africa, Rosenbauer says. One outbreak in Nigeria has been ongoing since 2005[this is a 2011 article...my edit], with 13 new cases reported so far this year