2/29/2024 0 Comments Flu shot side effect hospital 2017In 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. “With President Ford’s reelection campaign looming on the horizon, the campaign increasingly appeared politically motivated,” Kreston writes. By the time immunizations began on October 1, though, the proposed epidemic had failed to emerge (although Legionnaires' Disease had, confusing matters further.) This all happened in the spring, with emergency legislation for the “National Swine Flu Immunization Program,” being signed into effect in mid-April. They had promised a vaccine, so there needed to be a vaccine. government was unstoppable,” di Justo writes. They eventually found that the strain of flu that year was not a repeat or escalation of the 1918 flu, but “the U.S. The World Health Organization adopted more of a wait-and-see attitude to the virus, writes Kreston. 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. To avoid an epidemic, the CDC believed, at least 80 percent of the United States population would need to be vaccinated. That earlier pandemic 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. He went on: The 1918 outbreak of “Spanish flu” killed half a million Americans, and the upcoming apocalypse was expected to kill a million. “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. secretary of health, education and welfare, announced that an epidemic of the flu that killed Pvt. On February 4, 1976, a young soldier named David Lewis died of a new form of flu. 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. 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. They will protect you and others from getting deadly and debilitating things like mumps, whooping cough, polio and measles. You should certainly get all of your other vaccines and make sure your children get them. To begin with: You should get a flu shot. “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.” “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. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, and rushed response led to a medical debacle that hasn’t gone away. In the spring of 1976, it looked like that year’s flu was the real thing.
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