Another flu, another vaccine.

Epidemics are always terrible. And Flu epidemics are the worst. There have been Seven Pandemics of Cholera in this world taking more than 20 million lives, yet none of them can match the terror of a plague.

On February 4 1976, a young soldier named David Lewis died of a new form of flu.

The virus was found to be closely related to the 1918 flu pandemic that killed over a 100 million people globally. There was panic everywhere.

This was also the year of re-election for the US President, Gerald Ford.

In late March, President Ford went into a press conference, ” At least 80 percent of the United States population would need to be vaccinated.” He announced.

“We are not only going to find a vaccine very soon, but we have a plan to vaccinate “every man, woman, and child in the United States.”

The people and the President both were in a hurry for a vaccine.

An emergency legislation for the “National Swine Flu Immunization program” was signed in the march and the vaccination took off on October 1. Within 10 months, nearly 45 million US citizens were vaccinated.
…
But in its hurry, the campaign had
got a lot of things wrong. They had got the vaccine strain wrong, the thermal protection of the vaccine was poor and soon they had a cluster of death resulting from the Immunisation.

But the real victims of this pandemic were the 450-odd people who came down with a dreadful nerve paralysis known as Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder after getting the flu shot.

Most unfortunately, By the time immunizations began, the proposed epidemic had failed to emerge.

That led to Gerald Ford’s defeat in the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter.

Does this time frame seem something familiar to us ?

This year also, we have a pandemic in February and we are rushing to have a vaccine by July.

We are forgetting that epidemiology always takes time. But politics is often about looking like you’re doing something eye catching lest you would lose your votes. For a successful statesman, an early Vaccine is a control not over the disease but over the Public.

No one can predict with absolute certainty what future directions a pandemic influenza might take.