Please join us in congratulating Dr. John Aldis, who was recognized as a Paul Harris Fellow +2. District 7360 Governor Sean Murtagh presented the award, with Club President Jen Wabnitz on hand to celebrate. The recognition honors John’s continued generosity to The Rotary Foundation, which funds Rotary’s humanitarian work around the world, including the effort to end polio.
John is a retired family physician living in Jefferson County whose career has taken him around the globe. After serving as a U.S. Navy physician and as an embassy doctor with the U.S. Foreign Service in Mali, Indonesia, Nigeria and China, he came home to Shepherdstown in 2001. Since then he has served as the first volunteer medical director of the Free Clinic in Ranson, worked in vaccine research at Fort Detrick and NIH, and was the founding medical director of the Home-Based Primary Care Program at the Martinsburg VA Medical Center.
That background in public health and vaccines made John the perfect speaker for his recent club presentation, Polio: It’s Not Here Now, But It Can Come Again. He reminded us that while polio has disappeared from daily life in the United States, the virus still circulates in parts of the world, and as long as it exists anywhere, children everywhere remain at risk. That is why Rotary’s PolioPlus campaign matters: Rotarians have helped immunize billions of children and brought wild polio to the brink of eradication, and every dollar raised is matched two-to-one by the Gates Foundation.
Thank you, John, for your service to our club, our community and the world. Congratulations!