University of Florida poultry expert says avian flu scare is a money bonanza for researchers

Bev Conover | December 21 2005

Do you remember the flu epidemic/pandemic that never was? It was the 1976 scare after a soldier at Fort Dix, NJ, contracted and died from swine flu, which led to the Ford administration, with the help of Congress, to launch a crash program to make a vaccine and inoculate 220 million Americans.

Never ones to pass up a buck or shell one out if they could avoid it, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries demanded the federal government assume all risk for any harm to people the vaccine might cause. Congress yielded.

By October of that year, the vaccine was ready and people lined up for shots.

About 40 million people received the vaccine before the program was halted in December 1976, after some 1,000 came down with Guillain-Barre syndrome (a rate seven times normal), a disease that can cause permanent paralysis, others contracted transverse myelitis, a neurological disorder, a reports of death associated with the vaccine range from 30-60. The government paid some $90 million in damages and the cost of the program was about $400 (both in 1976 dollars).

The difference between making a vaccine in 1976 and the current rush to create an avian flu vaccine is that in 1976 they knew what strain of flu the vaccine was supposed to prevent.

Now, nearly 30 years later, the fear card is being played over the possibility of an avian flu pandemic, the likelihood of which Dr. Gary Butcher of the University of Florida say is practically nil. Below is an article from Sunday's Star-Banner, Ocala, FL, in which Dr. Butcher claims the fear-mongering has more to do with money than likely danger to the public.

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