What Are Some Facts About the 1976 Swine Flu Vaccination Program?

While researching diseases, you might come across the inquiry of what are some facts about the 1976 swine flu vaccination program. Researching this question is an important way of understanding the history of the disease and its place in the United States.

Here is some important information that you should be aware of regarding this vaccination program.

• The situation that ultimately led to the vaccination program was an incident at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Two recruits there became ill with flu-like symptoms, and it was determine that they had swine flu.
• When the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on the United States Public Health Services reviewed the information regarding this disease, they stated that a main reason for an immunization program was the fact that it could be transmitted from one person to another.
• This group, commonly know as ACIP, was also the institution to decide that a vaccination program must be implemented.
• At the time, the flu vaccine was produced from fertilized hen's eggs from a particular group of hens.
• The director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention stated that the federal government should make enough of the vaccine available so that everyone in the country could be immunized against the disease.
• When the government looked at the costs of this program, they projected that it would run them approximately $137 million.
• With a budget and goals running so high, producing this amount of vaccination was a serious issue.
• Controversy existed over the effectiveness of the vaccine, and the general public became suspicious of it.
• The public also started to think that the government was saying that people had the swine flu (when they did not), in order to get other individuals to rush out and get the vaccine.
• Furthermore, doctors and researchers began finding that individuals who received the swine flu immunization were suffering from a disease known as Guillain-Barre syndrome. However, the numbers of people who actually experienced this correlation were very small.
• According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, "Had H1N1 influenza been transmitted at that time, the small apparent risk of GBS from immunization would have been eclipsed by the obvious immediate benefit of vaccine-induced protection against swine flu." Therefore, we can see that mob mentality and conspiracy theories were really being fed into the general public's minds during this time period.
• In December of 1976, the government decided that they would have to stop the immunization problem, even though the possibility of contracting Guillian-Barre syndrome from receiving the immunization were very small.
• The media had a large role in blowing up the problems related to the immunization.

CDC Website Is the Information Authority

All of these facts have been researched on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention website. Therefore, it is coming from a reliable resource. Perhaps you want to know more about the history of the swine flu, and what we have learned as a country from this 1976 fiasco involving the disease and immunization.

The CDC website is an excellent resource for starting your research, so that you can feel confident that the information you receive is both a factual and accurate representation of all of the components involved in the scenario, especially in light of recent issues with the swine flu in the United States.