Swine flu of 1976: lessons from the past
In 1976, a late winter outbreak of swine flu at a military base in the USA led to fears of a devastating pandemic. President Gerald Ford announced a plan to vaccinate everyone in the country. By the end of the year, 40 million out of some 200 million Americans were vaccinated for the new strain, but no pandemic appeared and public health credibility suffered. Dr Harvey Fineberg tells the Bulletin why his 1978 study of that public health response is still relevant today.
Q: What lessons can we draw from the swine flu response 30 years ago, when dealing with today’s threat of a pandemic?
A: The first lesson is to avoid over-confidence about scientific insights. Major flu pandemics arise on average only about three times every century, which means scientists can make relatively few direct observations in each lifetime and have a long time to think about each observation. That is a circumstance ripe for over-interpretation. For example, in ’76 having seen the so-called “Asian flu” of ’57 and the so-called “Hong Kong flu” of ’68, some experts believed that flu pandemics tended to recur on an 11-year cycle and they were prepared for an outbreak in the late 1970s. The idea of an 11-year cycle turned out to have no predictive value.
