The Swine Flu of 1976

       As we all know, all of us are stuck in out homes due to the Coronavirus that has been wreaking havoc all over the world.This is just an opinion, but I’ve felt like people have been very slow to react to advice from health officials telling them to shelter in place and socially distance themselves. There are many factors that lead to such a slow reaction, government unpreparedness, people's unwillingness to stay at home, but most importantly for this blog post, people’s distrust of health officials' information on the pandemic. This distrust can be traced all the way back to the swine flu of 1976.

       In the late winter of 1976, a completely novel strain of influenza was causing hundreds of respiratory infections at Fort Dix, an army post located in central New Jersey. Initially, this virus appeared to be           closely genetically related to the 1918 flu pandemic that killed over a 100 million people globally, a pandemic that shared the very same Fort Dix as one its points of origin. These striking coincidences, along with the virus’s “sustained person-to-person spread,” prompted global public health officials to start planning for what could conceivably burgeon into a series of large and deadly outbreaks, if not an actual pandemic, in the upcoming winter.

     The World Health Organization started to adopt wait and see reaction to the flu, but president Ford, motivated by the upcoming election, launched a nationwide initiative to get vaccinated from the supposed pandemic. Within 10 months, nearly 25% of the US population, or 45 million citizens, was vaccinated, but serious problems persisted throughout the process. Problems that would end up being caused for no reason seeing that the swine flu ended up not being that big of a deal when it was revealed that the flu wasn’t even related to the virus that caused the grisly 1918 epidemic

      Due to the urgency of creating new immunizations for a novel virus, the government used an attenuated “live virus” for the vaccine instead of an inactivated or “killed” form, increasing the probability of adverse side effects among susceptible groups of people receiving the vaccination. Furthermore, prominent American scientists and health professionals began questioning the campaign’s large expense and its drain on scarce public health resources. On top of this, scientists found out later on that the vaccine had resulted in over four-hundred and fifty people developing the paralyzing Guillain-Barré syndrome. The entire ordeal ended in a catastrophe, the New York Times went so far as to dub the whole affair a “fiasco,” damning one of the largest and probably one of the most well-intentioned public health initiatives by the US government.

Sources:
https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/6/09-040609/en/
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-1007_article
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-public-health-legacy-of-the-1976-swine-flu-outbreak