As New York gears up for a new
round of Ebola dread, here’s an artifact from one of
yesteryear’s epidemic fears: a pair of public service announcements
from the swine flu outbreak of 1976. I especially like the second
one, which starts about 30 seconds in—it’s a sort of micro horror
movie with steadily more discordant music:
The ’76 swine flu campaign became an
infamous fiasco: The virus killed only one person, while
several more people died from a side effect of the shots. The mistakes made then
have haunted the responses to subsequent public health threats, not
just among those fringe characters who oppose all vaccines always
but in the corridors of power. In 2002, Time
reports, George W. Bush opted “not to administer a nationwide
smallpox vaccination program—despite Vice President Dick Cheney’s
belief that doing so was a prudent counterterrorism step—because it
could have resulted in dozens of deaths.” Credit where it’s due:
The terrorist smallpox conspiracy never materialized, so Bush chose
correctly.
In the case of Ebola, at any rate—where the disease is eating
its way through West Africa and a vaccine is still in
development—that sort of dilemma would be a vast improvement
over the status quo.
(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)
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