The fake 1976 swine flu pandemic: how a presidential election year mass vaccination campaign paved the way for vaccine manufacturer indemnity
The pandemic that never was, the side effects that were terrifyingly real and the astonishing parallels of the 1976 "warp speed" debacle to 2020
It was 10:30 am on 12 October 1976, and Pascal Imperato, then New York Deputy Health Commissioner was waiting in line at the Chelsea Health Clinic on the west side of Manhattan, NYC. The clinic was one of around 60 centers scattered around New York carrying out the ambitious goal of vaccinating every man, woman and child in the city against “swine flu” (influenza A virus subtype H1N1) and Imperato was going to be photographed for the newspapers as he got his shot.
What was meant to be a mass vaccination public relations photo-op had already gone bad. “I remember that day. I remember it vividly,” recalls Imperato. “I saw those headlines on the subway. And I said, ‘Good God. All hell is breaking loose here.’”
Earlier that week, the papers had begun reporting troubling news from vaccine clinics in Pittsburgh: three apparently unexplained deaths due to heart attacks.
Two days later, the New York Post tabloid wrote of “The Scene at the Pennsylvania Death Clinic”, featuring emotional but almost certainly embellished tales: “One of the old people, 75-year old Julia Bucci, had winced at the hypodermic needle in her arm, had taken a few feeble steps, then dropped dead on the floor of the health station. Right in front of their eyes.”
Many of these stories turned out to be false and misleading. What was real though was the 362 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), a rare neurological illness, that occurred during the 6 weeks after the swine flu vaccination and represented an 8.8-fold increase over background rates.
It all began in January 1976. Several soldiers at Fort Dix US Army training base in New Jersey fell ill with respiratory symptoms and were diagnosed as influenza (flu). The next month, Private David Lewis, who had the symptoms, participated in a five-mile forced march, collapsed and died.
The led to the New Jersey Department of Health testing samples from the Fort Dix soldiers. They found that the majority of samples were of the more common Flu A Victoria strain. However, two were not. The atypical samples were sent to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, which found evidence of swine influenza A related to the 1918 flu pandemic, which had killed 50 to 100 million people worldwide.
The CDC panicked and went into overdrive. It informed the World Health Organization and the state of New Jersey. Then CDC Director David Sencer seized upon his moment in the limelight and called for mass vaccination of the country against swine flu. Sencer wrote in a in a memo dated March 13th, 1976 “The administration can tolerate unnecessary health expenditures better than unnecessary deaths”
Sencer abandoned the cautious language used by scientists in favor of the action language used by decision makers. He stated "present evidence and past experience indicated a strong possibility of widespread influenza activity" He claimed "it is assumed to be socially and politically unacceptable to plan for less than 100% coverage of the Nations 213 million citizens"
Of course, Sencer failed to mention that 1976 was a presidential election year, and if the pandemic came, it would come during campaign season and become a campaign issue. Funny how epidemics and pandemics seem to occur only during election time, isn't it?
This snowballed into the U.S. President Gerald Ford becoming personally involved after reading the outbreak memo and wholeheartedly endorsed Sencer’s mass vaccination program. Ford announced the launch of the National Swine Flu Immunization Program on March 24, 1976. He called for three actions: for Congress to appropriate $135 million to fund production of enough vaccine to inoculate the entire population of the United States; for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) to develop plans for distributing the vaccine from September to November of that year; and for every person to receive the vaccine once it became available.
Progress on swine flu vaccine manufacture was significantly impeded by vaccine manufacturers’ demanding the government provide liability protection to them in case of adverse reactions to inoculation. The National Swine Flu Immunization Program of 1976 legislation signed on August 12 answered that request and officially authorized HEW to carry out the planned inoculations. The language in the National Swine flu legislation used terms like “safe and effective” and “equitable” while simultaneously recusing vaccine manufacturers from all liability for harms arising from their products. It made the US government the defendant in all such claims. (See image panel below)
Gerald Ford met with a "blue ribbon" panel that included Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. Ford then made a televised announcement in support of the mass immunization program.
“Finally, I am asking each and every American to make certain he or she receives an inoculation this fall. Inoculations are to be available at schools, hospitals, physicians' offices, and public health facilities. The reaction to the shot, I am told, may mean a few sore arms for a day or two -- a very small price to pay for this vital protection.”
This issue worsened as the insurance industry refused to cover any of the vaccine manufacturers, which in turn told federal authorities they wouldn’t sell them vaccine without protection, even after Ford personally intervened. This delayed the vaccination program for months until Congress acceded to Ford’s demands for a law that would indemnify Big Pharma and make the federal government responsible for any legal damages resulting from vaccinations.
In the meantime, the drug companies had begun manufacturing the vaccine. But even here, there was trouble. Parke-Davis (now part of Pfizer) produced 2 million vaccine doses for the wrong type of influenza, setting back production by a month or more. The drug company and the CDC blamed each other.
The public also wasn’t on board. Although a Gallup poll released in August 1976 found that 93% of Americans knew about the swine flu vaccination program, only 53% had planned to get immunized. Scary public service announcements about the swine flu apparently hadn’t worked.
Due to delays in manufacture and giving pharmaceutical companies the indemnity they demanded, vaccine distribution did not begin until October 1976.
When the vaccination program finally started on Oct. 1, it didn’t take long for more problems to come.
Three elderly people in Pittsburgh died on Oct. 11 after receiving the vaccine, leading city and county officials there to suspend all vaccinations for swine flu and seasonal flu. A handful of jurisdictions followed. Although authorities later determined the fatalities weren’t caused by the swine flu vaccine, public trepidation about the immunization program ― and media scrutiny of it ― grew as more than 40 people died after being vaccinated that month.
To quell worries, Ford and his family were inoculated for swine flu on Oct. 14, an event that was televised and photographed.
In what has now become mandatory performative virtue signaling in our current times, this photo of Ford receiving receiving the swine flu shot was splashed across the pages of newspapers everywhere.
The next month, Minnesota health officials began to notice another disturbing trend when they recorded the first known instance of Guillain-Barre syndrome—a rare but potentially serious autoimmune condition in which the body attacks its own nerves— in a vaccinated patient. Minnesota had been especially aggressive in carrying out immunizations and had vaccinated nearly two-thirds of adults in the state.
By December 15, preliminary data suggested recent vaccinees had a sevenfold greater incidence of Guillain-Barre syndrome compared with those who had not received vaccine. Two days later, federal officials advised President Ford to suspend swine flu vaccinations, and the president agreed.
What’s worse, it also led the Ford administration to halt all flu inoculations, which didn’t resume until the early days of the Carter administration. The New York Times described the whole ordeal as a the “Swine Flu Fiasco”
Three weeks after the the swine flu vaccination efforts were discontinued and just 13 days before the end of Ford’s presidency, legendary comic and host of the “Tonight Show” Johnny Carson appeared in a sketch as his long-running clairvoyant character, Carnac the Magnificent. As Carnac, Carson would hold up sealed envelopes to his forehead and “guess” the answer to questions written on slips of paper within.
On the night of Jan. 7, 1977, Carson guessed, “the swine flu vaccine.” The question? “Name a cure for which there is no known disease.”
In the aftermath of this debacle, CDC and state and local health departments initiated a Guillain-Barre surveillance of all cases of GBS with an onset between October 1, 1976 (the commencement of the immunization program) and January 31, 1977 . This focused surveillance on GBS identified a total of 1,098 cases, 532 (48.5%) of which occurred sometime after receipt of a swine flu vaccine. Many notable epidemiologic features were identified, including a strong temporal correlation between time to vaccination and onset of disease.
The figure below is from the CDC paper published in the American Journal of epidemiology and paints quite a remarkable demonstration of this correlation:
When one takes stock of all that was said and done, public health authorities declared a pandemic that never was based on maybe a couple hundred “swine flu” cases, vaccinated a whooping 43 million Americans, which led to 30 people dying from an adverse reaction to the shot and an estimated 532 developing Guillain-Barre because of it.
There were more deaths and side effects than the number of people that had swine flu in 1976.
Liability for vaccine-related injury had already been a tender topic with drug manufacturers since the early 1960’s, most stemming from polio immunization. The awards were large and the trend unsettling. In 1974, the circuit court upheld a jury award of $200,000 in Reyes v Wyeth (498 F2nd 1264). to an eight-month-old infant who had contracted polio after receiving Sabin live-virus vaccine. (If you haven’t read my essays on the early days of polio vaccine contamination, they're enlightening if somewhat disturbing, and can be found by clicking on the links below)
The completely made up swine flu pandemic swung open the doors of indemnifying pharmaceutical companies in perpetuity by using the excuse of a “public health emergency”
Liability concessions afforded to pharmaceutical companies in 1976 formed the basis of the National childhood vaccine injury act of 1986, when Congress passed a law protecting vaccine manufacturers from severe personal injury and wrongful death resulting from vaccine injuries.
It was based on the notion that since vaccines keep the public safe, occasional rare and serious fatal side effects must be tolerated in pursuit of the greater good.
When Congress granted pharmaceutical companies immunity with the vaccine act of 1986, it also established the vaccine injury compensation program (VICP), basically its own "court," created to compensate those who claim vaccine injury.
Since its creation, VICP has paid out $5,134,788,935.74 (Not a typo, see image below)
These funds come from a tax on vaccines that are recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for routine administration to children.
The amount of the tax is $0.75 for each disease prevented by the vaccine. For example, the seasonal influenza (flu shot) vaccine prevents one disease, so the tax is $0.75. The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, which prevents three diseases, is taxed at $2.25.
Basically, the cost of each vaccine administered contains within it the cost to compensate the vaccine injured. For example, the government (so, you, the taxpayer) spent $29.2 billion buying COVID vaccines (again, not a typo, see below) and you, the taxpayer, paid in advance for any compensation claims that could arise from its mass administration while manufacturers unburdened by any fear of liability were free to count their earnings and come up with new boosters every year.
To recap: A corporation creates a product whose market is nearly every human being in the country. It faces no liability whatsoever arising from the use of its product. Any cost of the liability is borne by the consumer, and the consumer is mandated to take their product. What we have here is a wet dream business model so perfect that even business school students would have a hard time conjuring up such hypothetical scenarios in their classrooms, and yet it lives and breathes right in front of our very noses.
Is it any wonder that the number of vaccine approvals continues to hit new all time highs year after year while the time to approval is the lowest it has ever been?
Its hard to tell what comes next. But you don’t have to be a genius to know that if public health emergencies are great for profits with zero liabilities and increasing control, more public health emergencies you will be forced to endure.
Thank you for reading. This investigation was made possible with your patronage readership and encouragement. To continue reading more compelling content please subscribe, share and consider supporting my work. And while you’re here, please read my other articles. As always, I look forward to your comments.
Hello, this is a comment from The Netherlands. First of all: a brilliant article, detailed and easy to read, special when the reader can translate it in the browser.
Under the photo from ex pres. Ford you write:
"The next month, Minnesota health officials began to notice another disturbing trend when they recorded the first known instance of Guillain-Barre syndrome—a rare but potentially serious autoimmune condition in which the body attacks its own nerves— in a vaccinated patient. "
I am working in the health field: the body never attacks itsself. Autoimmune illness is a concoction term (they have many: e.i. 'safe and effective') from the pharma to blame the patient (his/her body). Why dont you write: "Guillain-Barre is the cause of injecting poison to a patient, who has to less resistance to eliminate the poison from his body." Because that is exactly what it is; and all the side-effects.
History repeats: this happens again with the poison-injection the last 4 years.
Thanks for reading. Regards Kees
Again, a very worthy well-structured piece which should be more widely disseminated.