Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

by Gina Kolata

On July 15, Merrell said it would be stopping its vaccine production entirely and that it would not eve...

The vaccine manufacturers, in the meantime, were making the swine flu vaccine in bulk but were not putting it in vials so it could be distributed. It would take weeks to package the vaccine, delaying even further the start of an immunization campaign that now was beginning to seem hopelessly mired down.

The impasse lasted until August 1, when a swine flu scare spurred Congress to act. At an American Legion convention in a Philadelphia hotel a group of people fell ill and twenty-six died of a mysterious disease. It seemed to be a respiratory disease. It looked, in fact, like the flu, and some doctors said publicly that the men might have died from swine flu. For four days, while television stations showed funerals of the Legionnaires and the new disease made headlines, it seemed that the predicted flu epidemic had begun.

even though Legionnaires’ disease, as the illness became known, was not swine flu, the message was not lost on Congress: if it had been swine flu instead, the criticisms of Congress would have been withering and the ensuing panic impossible to counter with arguments about liability insurance. If it turned out that the American people were denied a vaccine because Congress refused to give legal protection to the vaccine makers, it could be a political nightmare. So Congress acted quickly, passing a “tort claims bill” that required that any claims arising from the swine flu vaccine be filed against the federal government.

Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr., of New Jersey, said that the law broke new ground. “This is pioneering, in a sense,” he said. But, he added, “it is in response to an emergency.”

On August 12, President Ford signed a bill into law committing the federal government to insuring the swine flu vaccine makers against claims that their product injured people.

Gallup poll taken on August 31 found that 95 percent of Americans had heard of the swine flu vaccination program and that 53 percent planned to take part.

The first Americans were immunized on October 1. Ten days later, the first deaths occurred.

bad batch of vaccine “is definitely a possibility that must be considered.”

Allegheny County suspended its swine flu campaign. And so did nine states. The press began a national body count.

As reports of the death toll proliferated, Dr. David Sencer, at the Centers for Disease Control, tried to stem the rising tide of fear.

It was the start of a tug-of-war between the Centers for Disease Control and the Pennsylvania coroner.

In the meantime, however, the public was growing increasingly jittery. To soothe their fears, President Ford and his family got their flu shots on October 14, and made sure that they were televised doing so.

Polls showed fewer and fewer Americans planned to be immunized.

Nonetheless, by mid-December, 40 million Americans, a third of the adult population, had had swine flu shots. It was twice as many as ever before immunized against flu in any single season and it was the largest vaccination program in history. All the while, however, a disaster was brewing.

On Thursday, December 16, Sencer conceded that the swine flu vaccination program must be stopped because of the possibility that the vaccine might be causing Guillain-Barré syndrome.

That day, with President Ford’s agreement, Dr. Theodore Cooper, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, announced that the swine flu immunization campaign was over. There had been not a single case of swine flu and the prospect of any danger at all from the vaccine was chilling.

The press was not kind. Harry Schwartz, the New York Times editorial writer, termed the swine flu campaign a “fiasco.” Writing on December 21, he blamed, among other things, “the self-interest of the government health bureaucracy which saw ...

But, at a time when ironies and mistaken assumptions were making a shambles of the swine flu vaccine, the secret irony of the Guillain-Barré link was perhaps the wryest one. The whole alarm came about because the Minnesota doctor who first reported a flu shot patient who got the disease had misheard an audiotape. He thought the tape warned that Guillain-Barré syndrome might follow flu shots. In fact it said just the opposite. It had used the disease as an example of how a faulty association could be drawn between a disease and the vaccine if, by chance, a person who had had the vaccine happened to become ill for reasons having nothing to do with the vaccine.

“Problems with diseases that may be confused or incorrectly interpreted as induced by influenza vaccine I think will occupy a lot of our time and a lot of our attention. We have at any one time in the state of California somebody who is in the process of developing the Landry-Guillain-Barré-Strohl or Guillain-Barré syndrome, the paralytic episode with sensory loss and so on, just spontaneously. Usually we have no indication of anything that’s setting this kind of problem off. I can assure you, though, that if someone is developing this and receives the influenza vaccine within about thirty days of the time of onset of that illness, this influenza vaccine will be blamed either for initiating it or making it worse.”

The aftermath of the fleeting campaign to immunize all Americans against the swine flu was a tidal wave of litigation.

Public health departments distributed masks during the pandemic in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus. Here the 39th Regiment, on its way to France, marches through the streets of Seattle, Washington, wearing masks provided by the American Red Cross (Courtesy of the National Archives. 165-WW 269 B-8)

man is turned away by a Seattle trolley conductor because he is not wearing a mask (Courtesy of the National Archives, 165-WW 269 B-11)

The more he investigated, the more he doubted whether the vaccine ever had anything to do with Guillain-Barré syndrome, becoming convinced that the entire association was spurious, a consequence of biased reporting.