Remember CNN when.....last September....
Funny how quickly these organizations spin on a dime and their lemmings follow along immediately.
Look at what they wrote below, and look at the cases she offers up. Especially the President Ford swine flu case. Sound eerily familiar to where we are now?
(CNN) Vaccine experts are warning the federal government against rushing out a coronavirus vaccine before testing has shown it's both safe and effective. Decades of history show why they're right.
The Cutter incident
On April 12, 1955 the government announced the first vaccine to protect kids against polio. Within days, labs had made thousands of lots of the vaccine. Batches made by one company, Cutter Labs, accidentally contained live polio virus and it caused an outbreak.
More than 200,000 children got the polio vaccine, but within days the government had to abandon the program.
"Forty thousand kids got polio. Some had low levels, a couple hundred were left with paralysis, and about 10 died," said Dr. Howard Markel, a pediatrician, distinguished professor, and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. The government suspended the vaccination program until it could determine what went wrong.
The epidemic that never was
In 1976, scientists predicted a pandemic of a new strain of influenza called swine flu. More than 40 years later, some historians call it "flu epidemic that never was."
"President Ford was basically told by his advisers, that look, we have a pandemic flu coming called swine flu that may be as bad as Spanish flu," said Michael Kinch, a professor of radiation oncology in the school of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. His latest book, "Between Hope and Fear," explores the history of vaccines.
"Ford was being cajoled to put forward a vaccine that was hastily put together. When you have a brand new strain situation like that, they had to do it on the fly," Kinch said.
Ford made the decision to make the immunization compulsory.
The government launched the program in about seven months and 40 million people got vaccinated against swine flu, according to the CDC. That vaccination campaign was later linked to cases of a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can develop after an infection or, rarely, after vaccination with a live vaccine.
"Unfortunately, due to that vaccine, and the fact that it was done so hastily, there were a few hundred cases of
Guillain-Barre, although it's not definitive that they were linked," Kinch said.
The
CDC said the increased risk was about 1 additional case of Gullain-Barre for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vaccine. Due to this small association, the government stopped the program to investigate.
"It was kind of a fiasco," Markel said. "The good news is that there never was an epidemic of swine flu. So we were safe, but that shows you what could happen."