Word: swine
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week Robert H. Ebert, dean of the Medical School, and five other distinguished doctors wrote to The New York Times to explain how splendid the swine flu immunization program had been. Not ones to indulge in the luxury of hind-sight, the doctors defended the ill-fated campaign, writing that "faced with the situation at that time, we would have been forced to the same conclusion." Probably true, but nothing to boast about...
Doctors never like to admit that doctors may be wrong. But in the case of the swine flu program reluctance, especially on the part of government officials, to admit to mistakes has approached a level reminiscent of the methods of the Vietnam War policy makers. As in the Vietnam days, there has been an unwillingness to listen to outside opinions; a pattern of decisionmaking by a small group; an intolerance of dissenting views, both within and outside the government; and an inability to reevaluate policy as circumstances changed. Although the swine flu fiasco at times seemed laughable, amateurish, the reasons...
...chances of a swine flu epidemic in 1976-1977 were always extremely small. One recruit in New Jersey died of swine flu, and the disease never reappeared. As the months passed, the chance of an epidemic went from unlikely to nearly impossible. When no one south of the Equator succumbed during the summer--the Southern Hemisphere's flu season--and when after eight months the New Jersey recruit remained the only victim, government officials should have admitted that their epidemic was not likely to occur and should have revised their policy accordingly...
...after a new strain of influenza would appear, but they were wrong in believing they could finally prevent a flu epidemic. The odds of predicting correctly what new strain will appear are small; when it arrives, in other words, the new strain probably will not be swine flu, but something entirely different...
...government was justified in offering swine flu vaccine to the elderly and the chronically ill, and the manufacture of enough vaccine for all Americans may also have made sense. But the vaccine should not have been administered to healthy citizens unless it proved necessary--unless swine flu reappeared. Since even the most violent epidemic takes some weeks to spread, and since the government's surveillance system would have provided an almost instant warning, a stockpile policy would have offered adequate protection without subjecting anyone to unnecessary risk...