In the Age of Bioterrorism, an Affair to Remember: The Silver Anniversary of the Swine Flu Epidemic That Never Was

Abstract

Twenty-five years ago, in November 1976, a physician misunderstood a cassette-tape providing continuing education for family practitioners to say that the rare neurological complication called Guillain-Barré syndrome could be a side effect of flu vaccines. When a recently vaccinated patient developed the syndrome, the physician alerted public officials and thereby started the process that ultimately ended the government campaign to immunize all Americans against swine flu. The physician was right, but for the wrong reasons, as Neustadt and Fineberg point out in the introduction to the 1983 edition of their classic case study of the swine flu episode (1983:xxv).