There was a pretty big panic as more soldiers came down with the illness that, in 1918, had killed 500,000 Americans.
A plan was hacked out to inoculate everybody in the United States.
$135 million was appropriated.
The inoculations began. People started getting sick. And dying. Only not from swine flu.
40 million people were inoculated by the time the government stopped the program.
The inoculation caused many cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome as well as other autoimmune reactions.
Dr. Anthony Morris, then director of the Virus Bureau of the FDA, said that there could be no vaccination because there had been no cases on which to test it.
He was fired.
More people died from vaccine-related illnesses than from the swine flu itself.
Now the government is considering plans to vaccinate the entire US against anthrax.
We know how much it hurts to think about the anthrax vaccine controversy, since it's now been relegated to that ever-growing bin of things that Republicans refuse to acknowledge and therefore aren't actually problems.
But it's not as if the FDA, in collusion with the DoD, ignored all findings that the vaccine was effectively useless and was, in fact, extremely harmful. They wouldn't do that.
And they'd never suppress the fact that the vaccine has never been tested on human subjects using any kind of formalized process, or that a safe dosage was never established using the FDA's own guidelines.
After all, from 1932 to 1972 the US Public Health Service injected syphilis into 400 poor blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama. Without telling them. Or treating them.
Years later that experiment got the blessing of the CDC, the NMA and the AMA (the same organization that burned Wilhelm Reich's studies rather than, let's say, subjecting them to the scientific process).
Then there's the cases of Vietnam Veterans being exposed to Agent Orange.
And while not necessarily deliberate, the government certainly did, and continues to do, their best to deny any ill effects. After all, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Diamond Shamrock, Uniroyal and other assorted manufacturers have a whole helluva lot of pull.
There is a present-day analogue to this as concerns the use of depleted uranium weapons.
And then we have the infamous MK-Ultra project. The government did a swell job on this one, since most people assume it was strictly an invention of crackpot conspiracy nuts.
Of course, the whole damn thing yielded a great body of work. We especially like the heading "Covert testing of substances and devices on unwitting subjects." But it's not like it was real.
Consider that the whole Gulf War Syndrome thing, the disease that the government wouldn't even admit existed until November of 2004, might be connected to that fucking Bioport toxin.
Think we're bitter much?
It's not like Bioport is going to profit from making their helpful vaccine, right?
