Some info on past vaccine disasters. And the CDC is letting itself be pressured into early release of Covid-19 vaccine.
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,"
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From 1955 to 1963, between 10% and 30% of polio vaccines were contaminated with
simian virus 40 (SV40).
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."
"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.
"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."