Vaccines should not be based on skin color or race. Then again, I refuse to take it, so they can give mine to whomever.
This "Warp Speed" vaccine has me concerned. I think I'll pass, too.
Smart. Here's what happened the last time the gov't fast-tracked a vaccine that was whipped up to treat an overblown pandemic, that was driven by political partisanship. Spoiler alert: It was a disaster, and a lot of people got sick before the plug was finally pulled on the mandatory vaccination program.
Let me know if any of this sounds familiar:
Some, but not all, of the hesitance to embrace vaccines can be traced back to this event more than 40 years ago
www.smithsonianmag.com
“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.”
[T]he U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare, announced that an epidemic of the flu that killed Pvt. Lewis [in 1976] 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," ,
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.
...
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.
... “[T]he U.S. government was unstoppable,” di Justo writes. They had promised a vaccine, so there needed to be a vaccine.
“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.
Is it responsible for some Americans' hesitancy to embrace vaccines?
www.discovermagazine.com
The rationale for mass vaccination seemed to stem from only the barest of biological reasoning — it turned out that the flu wasn’t even related to the virus that caused the grisly 1918 epidemic and, indeed,
those who were infected with the flu only suffered from a mild illness while the vaccine, for the reasons stated above, resulted in over four-hundred and fifty people developing the
paralyzing Guillain-Barré syndrome.
...
The American public can be notably skeptical of forceful government enterprises in public health, whether involving vaccine advocacy or limitations on the size of soft drinks sold in fast food chains
or even information campaigns against emerging outbreaks. The events of 1976 “triggered an enduring public backlash against flu vaccination, embarrassed the federal government and cost the director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control his job.” It may have even compromised Gerald Ford’s presidential re-election as well as the government’s response to a new sexually transmitted virus that emerged only a few years later in the early ‘80s, killing young gay men and intravenous drug users.
What happened in 1976 is a cautionary public health tale, the story of a vaccination quagmire that still resonates in the public psyche and in our discussions about vaccines today.
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