December 6, 2022
In September 2020, Christopher Klein did a feature for History Channel that addressed “When the US Government Tried to Fast-Track a Flu Vaccine”.
The article states, “After Private David Lewis collapsed and died during a basic training exercise at New Jersey’s Fort Dix on February 4, 1976, an investigation into the 19-year-old’s premature death identified a long-dormant, but notorious killer as the cause. Blood tests conducted at the Center for Disease Control revealed that Lewis had contracted a type of swine flu thought at the time to be genetically close to the 1918 influenza mislabeled the “Spanish flu,” which claimed the lives of more than 650,000 Americans and as many as 50 million around the globe. Eleven other soldiers at Fort Dix tested positive for swine flu, but recovered—while hundreds more at the base tested positive for swine flu antibodies. The New York Times reported on its front page that the “virus that caused the greatest world epidemic of influenza in modern history—the pandemic of 1918-19—may have returned.”
The article continues, “Even though no other swine flu cases had been detected outside Fort Dix, the CDC advocated a better-safe-than-sorry approach. “The administration can tolerate unnecessary health expenditures better than unnecessary deaths and illness,” Sencer wrote in a March 13 memo. When presented with a $135 million plan to prevent a pandemic that could cost billions of dollars and untold lives, President Gerald Ford had little political option, particularly in a presidential election year. “There was no way to go back on Sencer’s memo,” a presidential aide recalled. “If we tried to do that, it would leak. That memo’s a gun to our head.”
Access the full article here
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