When Vaccinations Were Pushed By The Media In 1976 Dallas TX #vaccine
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Published 2022-03-29
Pascal Imperato was waiting in line for his vaccine shot. So were the cameras.
It was around 10:30 in the morning on 12 October 1976, and Imperato was at the Chelsea Health Clinic, an Art Deco building in the lower west side of Manhattan. The clinic was one of around 60 locations dotted around New York, preparing to vaccinate almost everyone in the city.
That year, fears of a swine flu pandemic had loomed large, so President Gerald Ford had ordered an unprecedented mass vaccination of everyone in the United States. As Imperato rolled up his sleeve, it was the first day of the effort in New York.
Imperato was deputy health commissioner and the chair of the task force charged with rolling out the programme in the city, so had volunteered to be photographed for the newspapers as he got his shot. The mayor of New York City, when asked, had refused, so Imperato had stepped up. Turnout was strong across the city that morning.
But what was meant to be a ceremonial opening and positive public relations effort would turn sour. That week, the papers had begun reporting troubling news from vaccine clinics in Pittsburgh: three apparently unexplained deaths due to heart attacks.
“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.’”
The headlines would get worse. 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.”
The stories, it would turn out, were false and misleading. But it was just one of many problems that plagued the “swine flu affair of 1976”, when a US president decided to rush a vaccine to the entire American population based on ill-founded science and political imprudence. Lawsuits, side-effects and negative media coverage followed, and the events dented confidence in public health for years to come. What happened might even have laid the foundations for the mistaken anti-vax views and distrust in public health that would spread decades later.
As the world rushes to roll out a vaccine to billions of people today, what might we learn from the ill-fated events of 1976? -By Richard Fisher
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