|
The Long Shadow of the 1976 Swine Flu Vaccine ‘Fiasco'
 [Smithsonian] 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. Posted by: Besoeker 2021-06-08 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=603997 |