Many people believe the Swine Flu outbreak of 1976 was a hoax. Others believe it was overreaction. Some think the government did the only thing they could.
Many people are critical of the government response because the swine flu vaccine is believed to have killed 25 people, whereas the swine flu (if that's what it really was!) only killed 1 person. That's 2400% more people who died from the vaccine than the disease! How can any rational person possibly think it wasn't a deliberate conspiracy on the part of the government and the pharmaceutical companies? This (or variations thereof) appeals to the intuition of a lot of people.
Unfortunately, intuition is not logic. Think about it this way: 40 million people got the vaccine. The death rate in 1976 was 8.8 people per 1000. So, (if I'm thinking this through correctly) assuming a random distribution (which is probably not a good assumption, but let's go with it for the moment), approximately 352,000 people out of that 40 million died in 1976. The 25 who died from the vaccine were less than 0.008% of the people who died, and less than 0.0000625% of the total people vaccinated ... those numbers are both less than the margin of error of any statistical analysis I've ever seen.
Plus, not all 25 people died within a year of that. At least one woman died in 1982, five or six years after the fact. So the real annual increase is somewhat less.
Plus plus, from what I've read, a disproportionate number of elderly people got the vaccinations, a group of people at much higher risk to the disease as well as complications from the vaccine.
Do any of these numbers make the deaths any less tragic? Of course not. However, it is possible that the 40 million who were vaccinated (over 18% of the country at the time) eliminated many potential infection vectors. It's also possible that it made no difference. We'll never know.
Me? I think the government probably overreacted. I also think they were damned if they did go ahead with vaccinations and no one died of swine flu (even though that is the intent of the vaccine!) and damned if they didn't go ahead and there was a massive outbreak.
Many people (the well intentioned as well as those who just want to make a name for themselves) fail to take into account (unintentionally or otherwise) that there is a mortality rate associated with everything. Vaccinations have a mortality rate, which is generally quite a bit lower than the mortality rate of the disease it is designed to prevent.
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