Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that the flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nationwide outbreak, a pandemic. Well, 46 million of us obediently took the shot, and now 4,000 Americans are claiming damages from Uncle Sam amounting to $3.5 billion.
00:00:00.000The flu season is upon us. Which type will we worry about this year? And what kind of shots will we be told to take?
00:00:10.000Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the US government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation.
00:00:20.000And Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nationwide outbreak, a pandemic.
00:00:28.000Well, 46 million of us obediently took the shot. And now 4,000 Americans are claiming damages from Uncle Sam amounting to three and a half billion dollars because of what happened when they took that shot.
00:00:41.000By far the greatest number of the claims, two thirds of them, are for neurological damage or even death, allegedly triggered by the flu shot.
00:00:49.000We pick up the story back in 1976 when the threat posed by the swine flu virus seemed very real indeed.
00:00:57.000This virus was the cause of a pandemic in 1918 and 1919 that resulted in over half a million deaths in the United States, as well as 20 million deaths around the world.
00:01:10.000Thus, the US government's publicity machine was cranked into action to urge all America to protect itself against the swine flu menace.
00:01:20.000Influenza is serious business. During major flu epidemics, millions of people are sick and thousands die.
00:01:27.000Well, this year you can get protection. The vaccines are safe, easy to take, and they can protect you against flu. So roll up your sleeve. Protect yourself.
00:01:39.000One of those who did roll up her sleeve was Judy Roberts. She was perfectly healthy, an active woman, when in November of 1976, she took her shot.
00:01:48.000Two weeks later, she says, she began to feel a numbness starting up her legs.
00:01:52.000I joked about it at that time. I said, I'll be numb to the knees by Friday if this keeps up. By the following week, I was totally paralyzed.
00:02:02.000So completely paralyzed, in fact, that they had to operate on her to enable her to breathe. And for six months, Judy Roberts was a quadriplegic.
00:02:11.000The diagnosis? A neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome, GBS for short.
00:02:17.000These neurological diseases are little understood. They affect people in different ways.
00:02:23.000As you can see in these home movies taken by a friend, Judy Roberts' paralysis confined her mostly to a wheelchair for over a year.
00:02:31.000But this disease can even kill. Indeed, there are 300 claims now pending from the families of GBS victims who died, allegedly as a result of the swine flu shot.
00:02:41.000In other GBS victims, the crippling effects diminish and all but disappear.
00:02:46.000But for Judy Roberts, progress back to good health has been painful and partial.
00:02:52.000Now, I noticed that your smile, Judy, is a little bit constricted.
00:03:46.000I'd never taken any other flu shots, but I felt like this was going to be a major epidemic.
00:03:53.000And the only way to prevent a major epidemic of a really deadly variety of flu was for everybody to be immunized.
00:04:01.000Where did this so-called deadly variety of flu, where did it first hit back in 1976?
00:04:07.000It began right here at Fort Dixon, New Jersey, in January of that year, when a number of recruits began to complain of respiratory ailments, something like the common cold.
00:04:16.000An Army doctor here sent samples of their throat cultures to the New Jersey Public Health Lab to find out just what kind of bug was going around here.
00:04:25.000One of those samples was from a Private David Lewis, who had left his sickbed to go on a forced march.
00:04:30.000Private Lewis had collapsed on that march, and his sergeant had revived him by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
00:04:35.000But the sergeant showed no signs of illness.
00:04:41.000If this disease is so potentially fatal that it's going to kill a young, healthy man, a middle-aged schoolteacher doesn't have a prayer.
00:04:49.000The New Jersey lab identified most of those soldiers' throat cultures as the normal kind of flu virus going around that year,
00:04:55.000but they could not make out what kind of virus was in the culture from the dead soldier and from four others who were sick.
00:05:02.000So they sent those cultures to the Federal Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, for further study.
00:05:08.000A few days later, they got the verdict. Swine flu.
00:05:12.000But that much-publicized outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix involved only Private Lewis, who died,
00:05:18.000and those four other soldiers who recovered completely without the swine flu shot.
00:05:23.000If I had known at that time that the boy had been in a sickbed, got up, went out on a forced march, and then collapsed and died, I would never have taken a shot.
00:05:34.000The rationale for our recommendation was not on the basis of the death of a single individual,
00:05:40.000but it was on the basis that when we do see a change in the characteristics of the influenza virus, it is a massive public health problem in this country.
00:05:50.000Dr. David Sensor, then head of the CDC, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, is now in private industry.
00:05:57.000He devised the swine flu program, and he pushed it.
00:06:01.000You began to give flu shots to the American people in October of 76.
00:09:27.000I guess you would have to make that assumption.
00:09:33.000Then why does this report from your own agency, dated July 1976, list neurological complications as a possibility?
00:09:43.000I think the consensus of the scientific community was that the evidence relating neurologic disorders to influenza immunization,
00:09:56.000that they did not feel that this association was a real one.
00:10:01.000You didn't feel it was necessary to tell American people that information?
00:10:04.000I think that over the years we have tried to inform the American people as fully as possible.
00:10:13.000As part of informing Americans about the swine flu threat, Dr. Sensor's CDC also helped create the advertising to get the public to take the shot.
00:10:22.000Let me read to you from one of your own agency's memos planning the campaign to urge Americans to take the shot.
00:10:29.000The swine flu vaccine has been taken by many important persons, he wrote.
00:10:34.000Example, President Ford, Henry Kissinger, Elton John, Muhammad Ali, Mary Tyler Moore, Rudolph Nureyev, Walter Cronkite, Ralph Nader, Edward Kennedy, et cetera, et cetera.
00:10:47.000Uh, I'm not familiar with that particular piece of paper, but I do know that at least of that group, President Ford did take the vaccination.
00:10:54.000Did you talk to these people beforehand to find out if they planned to take the shot?