But while the World Health Organization adopted a cautious “wait and see” policy to monitor the virus’s pattern of disease and to track the number of emerging infections, President Gerald Ford’s administration embarked on a zealous campaign to vaccinate every American with brisk efficiency.

“Get a shot of protection. The swine flu shot.” The video above shows the Ford Administration’s advertisements for vaccinating agianst the swine flu.

Within 10 months, nearly 25% of the US population, or 45 million citizens, was vaccinated, but serious problems persisted throughout the process (2). Due to the urgency of creating new immunizations for a novel virus, the government used an attenuated “live virus” for the vaccine instead of a inactivated or “killed” form, increasing the probability of adverse side effects among susceptible groups of people receiving the vaccination. Furthermore, prominent American scientists and health professionals began questioning the campaign’s large expense and its drain on scarce public health resources (2).

With President Ford’s reelection campaign looming on the horizon, the campaign increasingly appeared politically motivated. The rationale for mass vaccination seemed to stem from only the barest of biological reasoning – it turned out that the flu wasn’t even related to the virus that caused the grisly 1918 epidemic and, indeed, those who were infected with the flu only suffered from a mild illness while the vaccine, for the reasons stated above, resulted in over four-hundred and fifty people developing the paralyzing Guillain-Barré syndrome. Meanwhile, outside the United States’ borders, the flu never mushroomed into the anticipated public health disaster. It was the pandemic that never was. The New York Times went so far as to dub the whole affair a “fiasco,” damning one of the largest and probably one of the most well-intentioned public health initiatives by the US government (1)