Don’t Blame H1N1 Swine Flu Shots for All Ills, CDC

Don’t Blame H1N1 Swine Flu Shots for All Ills, Officials Say

New York : As soon as swine flu vaccinations start next month, some people getting them will drop dead of heart attacks or strokes, some children will have seizures and some pregnant women will miscarry.

But those events will not necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine. That poses a public relations challenge for federal officials, who remember how sensational reports of deaths and illnesses derailed the large-scale flu vaccine drive of 1976.

This time they are making plans to respond rapidly to such events and to try to reassure a nervous public — and headline-hunting journalists — that the vaccine is not responsible.

Officials are particularly worried about spontaneous miscarriages, because they are urging pregnant women to be among the first to be vaccinated. Pregnant women are usually advised to get flu shots, because they and their fetuses are at high risk of flu complications, but this year the pressure is greater. Expectant mothers are normally advised to avoid drugs, alcohol and anything else that might affect a fetus.

In the opening days of the 1976 vaccination campaign, which eventually vaccinated 45 million Americans, three elderly Pittsburgh residents died soon after receiving their shots at the same clinic. Though scientists believe it was just a freakish coincidence, some news reports suggested the vaccine had killed them.

“Press frenzy was so intense it drew a televised rebuke from Walter Cronkite for sensationalizing coincidental happenings,” Dr. David J. Sencer, who was then the director of the C.D.C., wrote in 2006 reflections on the vaccination campaign.

Two months later, reports emerged of vaccine recipients suffering from Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves, leading to temporary or permanent paralysis and, in a few cases, death. That effectively ended the campaign, as officials suspended it to investigate. Experts still disagree over whether the vaccine caused cases to increase that year, and the C.D.C. will be on high alert for reports of it this year.

Guillain-Barré’s cause is unknown, though different studies have suggested it more often affects people who have had a flu shot, the flu itself, some bacterial infections — or even, according to Dr. Sencer’s paper, people who have been struck by lightning.

In any case, after the suspension, there was no reason to restart because the predicted swine flu epidemic never emerged.

That, experts emphasize, is the great difference between 1976 and 2009. The earlier virus apparently burned out the previous winter inside Fort Dix, N.J., before any vaccine was even made, while this pandemic H1N1 virus has already infected millions and, unchecked, will probably reach over two billion, according to the World Health Organization.

In 1976, getting flu shots into 45 million Americans was unprecedented. Now about 100 million get annual shots, and the government has ordered twice that many doses of swine flu vaccine.

Other changes since 1976 worry officials. The 24-hour cycle of news on television and the Internet did not then exist; public health officials now must be ready to respond to rumors (Or truth) instantly. In 1976, the C.D.C. did not hold news conferences, and it took it five days to respond to the Pittsburgh deaths, Dr. Fineberg said.

“Back then, it was a neat thing to have a fax machine and get out four pages a minute,” said Joe Quimby, a press officer for the disease centers. “Now, communications have to be multimodal. Turning on the three broadcast news outlets is not going to reach everybody any more.”

The agency now has a “war room” in its Atlanta headquarters and, since the pandemic began in April, has held news conferences, sometimes even daily, at which reporters from around the world ask questions by phone. They can be seen live on the agency’s Web site, and it has another Web site, flu.gov, devoted to the pandemic, as well as a constantly updated Facebook page and Twitter feed.

Complicating the challenge for officials, some experts argue, is that health news coverage has suffered since 1976.

Also, antivaccine activists(like us) are far more powerful now. Thirty-three years ago, vaccines were enthusiastically welcomed; many parents or grandparents still remembered children dead of smallpox, measles or polio. The minority opposing them were often followers of natural healing or traditional chiropractic beliefs.

In 1976, autism was not on the public’s mind, and the problem was still attributed to indifferent mothering. Vietnam veterans with chronic illnesses usually blamed Agent Orange, a defoliant.

Today, many parents blame vaccines for their children’s autism and some ill Gulf War veterans blame their anthrax shots.As even H1N1 Swine Flu Vaccine Panvax Manufacturer "Listed Guillian-Barre Syndrome as vaccine side effect"

Some antivaccine groups are raising fears of thimerosal, a preservative used in some brands of flu vaccine. Others issue dire warnings about squalene, an immune booster used in military vaccines and in some European flu vaccines but not in any American ones.New H1N1 Swine Flu Vaccine Contains Adjuvants,European Medicines Agency

And, in the rancor over health insurance reform, unfounded rumors are spreading that the Obama administration will make swine flu shots mandatory. Administration officials have emphatically denied that. But a recent decision by New York State to make them mandatory for all hospital employees has reinvigorated those rumors on the Internet.

To defend itself, Dr. Butler said, the C.D.C, has compiled data on how many problems like heart attacks, strokes, miscarriages, seizures and sudden infant deaths normally occur. And it has broken those figures down for various high-priority vaccine groups, like pregnant women or children with asthma.As Canada admits there is no data on the use of adjuvanted H1N1 Swine flu jabs on pregnant women.

When vaccinations begin, it plans to gather reports from vaccine providers, hospitals and doctors, looking for signs of adverse events, so it can detect problems before rumors( or truth) grow.