Auszug vom link oben:
The first swine flu, 1976: The pandemic that wasn't
Scary as it is now, the first time swine flu appeared in the States was more of a whimper than a bang.
The virus first popped up in early February 1976, when a 19-year-old private at Fort Dix, New Jersey, reported to his superior that he felt ill and tired, although not so bad as to skip the training hike later that day. He died within 24 hours. It was echoes of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic all over again.
An autopsy revealed that the young soldier had contracted swine flu; shortly after, other soldiers were admitted to the hospital with the same symptoms and officials soon found that 500 people at the base were infected with the virus, though they hadn't become ill.
Upon hearing about the potential pandemic, President Gerald Ford ordered the mobilization of a nationwide vaccination program, at a cost of $135 million in 1976 dollars -- that'd be roughly $505 million today. After the first reported infection in February, the virus laid low for the next few months.
In October 1976, health officials, armed with a vaccination and a healthy dose of scaremongering, took to the streets. Propaganda about the potential pandemic was more frightening than the actual thing and possibly even more frightening than the news reports this time around. Health officials tried hard to terrify the populace into getting flu shots with an ominous voice intoning "a swine flu epidemic may be coming" over images of people lying in hospital sickbeds. It worked: More than 40 million Americans, a quarter of the population, got their flu shots.
However, that may have not been the best idea -- while the flu itself only killed one person, the vaccine killed more than 30. Within two months after the mass inoculations began, 500 people came down with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease.
This, combined with the fact that the prophesied epidemic never really materialized, didn't exactly help Ford's flagging political career: While the dismal economic state probably had more to do with it, Ford lost re-election that year.