I’ve seen claims before that the CDC’s response to the 1976 H1N1 epidemic had long-term negative public health consequences, but after a few minutes of looking for evidence of this, I’m not sure it’s true.
In the fall of 1976, based on fears that a January outbreak of swine flu was going to become a 1918-scale pandemic in the coming season, the CDC vaccinated around 25% of the American populace. However, new cases of H1N1 weren’t appearing, people were developing Guillain–Barré syndrome after being vaccinated, Ford lost the election, and the whole program was abandoned. The received wisdom (e.g. this Discover article) seems to be that this was viewed as a disaster and increased distrust of government vaccination campaigns.
From what I can tell from this article on Influenza Pandemics of the 20th Century and the the CDC’s 2006 reflections on the vaccination program, though, the public health officials involved in the campaign feel like they reacted reasonably given the information they had? (Most of the world did not mount mass vaccination campaigns, and it was not an unusually bad flu season.)
Anyway, leaving this as a comment rather than an answer, since this was an overreaction to the H1N1 strain that existed, but I don’t know if it was an overreaction to the information accessible in February 1976, and it’s not clear that it had terrible consequences.
The issue with 1976 is that they reacted reasonably when considering only short term questions of public health, but plausibly overreacted from the perspective of longer term ability to keep the population healthy.
I would argue that given information available, they made the approximately correct decision, but the costs were higher than they expected in a way that they could have predicted, had they thought more about public reaction to failure. I will note that it’s very likely this failure had far less predictable but very significant consequences over the next 50 years, given that the fear and overreaction afterwards is part of the background of most of the people skeptical of vaccines, and plausibly created or fed the initial fearmongering.
This (not wanting to lose credibility by being perceived to overreact) was my thought as well.
I’m not claiming this is the case, but I think if a public health person said “we’re worried about causing panic” when they actually meant “we’re worried about being seen to overreact”, I would consider that quite dishonest.
I’ve seen claims before that the CDC’s response to the 1976 H1N1 epidemic had long-term negative public health consequences, but after a few minutes of looking for evidence of this, I’m not sure it’s true.
In the fall of 1976, based on fears that a January outbreak of swine flu was going to become a 1918-scale pandemic in the coming season, the CDC vaccinated around 25% of the American populace. However, new cases of H1N1 weren’t appearing, people were developing Guillain–Barré syndrome after being vaccinated, Ford lost the election, and the whole program was abandoned. The received wisdom (e.g. this Discover article) seems to be that this was viewed as a disaster and increased distrust of government vaccination campaigns.
From what I can tell from this article on Influenza Pandemics of the 20th Century and the the CDC’s 2006 reflections on the vaccination program, though, the public health officials involved in the campaign feel like they reacted reasonably given the information they had? (Most of the world did not mount mass vaccination campaigns, and it was not an unusually bad flu season.)
Anyway, leaving this as a comment rather than an answer, since this was an overreaction to the H1N1 strain that existed, but I don’t know if it was an overreaction to the information accessible in February 1976, and it’s not clear that it had terrible consequences.
The issue with 1976 is that they reacted reasonably when considering only short term questions of public health, but plausibly overreacted from the perspective of longer term ability to keep the population healthy.
The book by Neustadt and Fineberg is the classic historical case study, and was a well done postmortem. It does a good job talking about the points on both sides of the issue, and why the decisions were made as they were: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12660/the-swine-flu-affair-decision-making-on-a-slippery-disease
I would argue that given information available, they made the approximately correct decision, but the costs were higher than they expected in a way that they could have predicted, had they thought more about public reaction to failure. I will note that it’s very likely this failure had far less predictable but very significant consequences over the next 50 years, given that the fear and overreaction afterwards is part of the background of most of the people skeptical of vaccines, and plausibly created or fed the initial fearmongering.
This (not wanting to lose credibility by being perceived to overreact) was my thought as well.
I’m not claiming this is the case, but I think if a public health person said “we’re worried about causing panic” when they actually meant “we’re worried about being seen to overreact”, I would consider that quite dishonest.