We can't blame it for the modern anti-vaccine movement, which has more recent roots in a retracted paper that linked one vaccine to autism, but it certainly had an effect on the public's view of vaccines. But this is a story about one time over 40 years ago when poor decision-making on the part of the government led to the unnecessary vaccination of about 45 million citizens. They will protect you and others from getting deadly and debilitating things like mumps, whooping cough, polio and measles. You should certainly get all of your other vaccines and make sure your children get them. To begin with: You should get a flu shot. “This government-led campaign was widely viewed as a debacle and put an irreparable dent in future public health initiative, as well as negatively influenced the public’s perception of both the flu and the flu shot in this country.”
“Some of the American public’s hesitance to embrace vaccines - the flu vaccine in particular - can be attributed to the long-lasting effects of a failed 1976 campaign to mass-vaccinate the public against a strain of the swine flu virus,” writes Rebecca Kreston for Discover. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, and rushed response led to a medical debacle that hasn’t gone away. In the spring of 1976, it looked like that year’s flu was the real thing. This 1976 photograph shows a woman receiving a vaccination during the nationwide swine flu vaccination campaign.
