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.
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.