Posted on 03/05/2020 4:39:15 PM PST by nickcarraway
In the spring of 1976, it looked like that year’s flu was the real thing. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, and rushed response led to a medical debacle that hasn’t gone away.
“Some of the American public’s hesitance to embrace vaccines — the flu vaccine in particular — can be attributed to the long-lasting effects of a failed 1976 campaign to mass-vaccinate the public against a strain of the swine flu virus,” writes Rebecca Kreston for Discover. “This government-led campaign was widely viewed as a debacle and put an irreparable dent in future public health initiative, as well as negatively influenced the public’s perception of both the flu and the flu shot in this country.”
To begin with: you should get a flu shot. You should certainly get all of your other vaccines and make sure your children get them. They will protect you and others from getting deadly and debilitating things like mumps, whooping cough, polio and measles. But this is a story about one time over 40 years ago when poor decision-making on the part of the government led to the unnecessary vaccination of about 45 million citizens. We can't blame it for the modern anti-vaccine movement, which has more recent roots in a retracted paper that linked one vaccine to autism, but it certainly had an effect on the public's view of vaccines.
On February 4 1976, a young soldier named David Lewis died of a new form of flu. In the middle of the month, F. David Matthews, the U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare, announced that an epidemic of the flu that killed Pvt. Lewis was due in the fall. “The indication is that we will see a return of the 1918 flu virus that is the most virulent form of flu,” he said, reports Patrick di Justo for Salon. He went on: the 1918 outbreak of “Spanish flu” killed half a million Americans, and the upcoming apocalypse was expected to kill a million.
Spanish influenza was another form of swine flu, di Justo writes, and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control thought that what was happening could well be a new, even deadlier strain that was genetically close to the 1918 strain.
To avoid an epidemic, the CDC believed, at least 80 percent of the United States population would need to be vaccinated. When they asked Congress for the money to do it, politicians jumped on the potential good press of saving their constituents from the plague, di Justo writes.
The World Health Organization adopted more of a wait-and-see attitude to the virus, writes Kreston. They eventually found that the strain of flu that year was not a repeat or escalation of the 1918 flu, but “the U.S. government was unstoppable,” di Justo writes. They had promised a vaccine, so there needed to be a vaccine.
This all happened in the spring, with emergency legislation for the “National Swine Flu Immunization Program,” being signed into effect in mid-April. By the time immunizations began on Oct. 1, though, the proposed epidemic had failed to emerge (although Legionnaires' Disease had, confusing matters further.)
“With President Ford’s reelection campaign looming on the horizon, the campaign increasingly appeared politically motivated,” Kreston writes. In the end, one journalist at The New York Times went so far as to call the whole thing a “fiasco.” Epidemiology takes time, politics is often about looking like you’re doing something and logistics between branches of government are extremely complicated. These factors all contributed to the pandemic that never was.
The real victims of this pandemic were likely the 450-odd people who came down with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, after getting the 1976 flu shot. On its website, the CDC notes that people who got the vaccination did have an increased risk of “approximately one additional case of GBS for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vaccine.”
Several theories as to why this happened exist, they say, “but the exact reason for this link remains unknown.” As for the flu shot today, the CDC writes, if there is any increased risk it is “very small, about one in a million. Studies suggest that it is more likely that a person will get GBS after getting the flu than after vaccination.”
I distinctly remember being in the doc’s office, asking for the ‘flu shot. He had the needle all prepped, when something inside told me,’No’.
I think he was a little put-out; and I’m not sure that I had heard about Guillain-Barre yet.
Back in 1976?
I don’t recall the exact date. I just remember ‘Swine Flu’ - it was the first time that any of us had been conditioned to be afraid of ‘flu - and BEING afraid of it; and then having second thoughts just before the doc was about to inject.
My mother developed Guillain–Barré Syndrome from that shot in 1976. She nearly died but did survive with a partially paralyzed right leg. She live to be 87 years old.
I was in boot camp that year. We were all vaccinated. Nearly everybody had some sort of negative reaction to the shot which negative impact on our PT performance.
I guess my youthful intuition was more or less correct.
Same here - I got the shot and was wishing for death instead of the effects from the shot.
Well, we are a lot better at the science now, than we were 40-some years ago.
I would not suggest that folks take these posts as guidance wrt future vaccines. Just wait, and see how things go.
One day your crushing PT the next, after the shot, your wheezing and aching like you were an old man.
In navy A school we were forced to take swine flu shot and then were forced to sign papers stating that we had volunteered for the shot.
Yeah, 40 years later and I got the last round of the Swine flu—the last pandemic that was supposed to decimate the world. When I reported for my Reserve duty the following month, I was required to get my vaccine— one since proven to be without efficacy—despite my having a natural immunity from my exposure.
Yeah, we’ve come a long way in 40 years—a hell of a long way from common sense and individual liberty.
Woke up in the middle of the night having difficulty breathing.
Couldn't move a muscle, only my eyelids.
Went back to sleep eventually, figuring I was never going to wake up, a good way to croak.
Woke up the next morning and was fine.
Was forced to get the shot the next 4 years in the USAF, no problems.
Most years have gotten it (voluntarily) since then, no problems, no flu.
2 or 3 years was busy and forgot about it, didn't get it.
You look at the info you can find, cross your fingers, and do what you think might be right.
The whole thing, like life in general, is a crapshoot.
I happen to go for the vaccine.
Mine experience was NAVY as well. I don’t remember having the theoretical choice, though. It’s possible. The early training days are sort of a blurr.
During that outbreak I was attending one of Enormous State University (hat tip to "Tank McNamara"), tens of thousands of kids, and never noticed any big uptick in illness. All us kids were hurrying around to class on a large campus, eating in cafeterias, crowding onto the campus buses, and going to the health center for, uh, other ailments. Other students were leaving school because of their grades, or drug busts, or other shenanigans. :^)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.