JUNE 2019 15
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However, statistically, every day a number of
people are going to have a heart attack
whether they’ve had a flu vaccination or not.
People connected dots that were not there.
The vaccine program was widely criticized
and the CDC’s head was forced out.
Annual flu shot—yes or no? Public health
officials recommend that every year all Ameri-
cans over age six months get a flu vaccine.
Influenza, however, is a shapeshifter. It
mutates quickly into strains the body doesn’t
recognize. In a good year, if scientists have pro-
jected correctly about which strains will be cir-
culating that season, the vaccine is only 50
percent effective. The 2017-18 vaccine was 20
percent to 40 percent effective. In the United
Kingdom and much of Europe, the vaccine is
only recommended for the very young, the
elderly, pregnant women, and those with weak-
ened immune systems or chronic disease.
Can scientists prevent another 1918?
Pessimists say it is only a matter of
time before another pandemic occurs.
We need to work hard at prevention
and be ready to treat a lot of sick peo-
ple. Optimists say the chances of another 1918
are very small. There have been other pan-
demics but none remotely close to 1918 in
magnitude. Today we have antibiotics to cure
secondary bacterial pneumonias and we have
vaccines that are at least somewhat effective.
But both sides agree that to prevent another
influenza catastrophe, we need to study the
1918 virus, learn how it caused its damage and
how it spread so quickly. +
jumped to humans in France in 1916 and had two years to spread before
mutating into its deadly form. Still others believe the second wave
started in June 1918 in South China, where the new virus may have
mutated in domestic fowl and infected people, including the 140,
Chinese workers brought to France during the Great War to dig trenches
and clear battlefields.
The pandemic burned itself out. Why? The most likely explanation is
that eventually everyone who could be infected had either died or
recovered. People who were unaffected or had mild cases either had
strong immune systems or had been exposed previously, possibly to a
similar flu strain that caused a large outbreak in 1898. The 1918 virus
may have killed many young soldiers because they were born after that
1898 epidemic and so did not develop immunity.
Explain the hunt for the “dead” 1918 virus. In 1951, a virologist’s chance
remark about the possibility that the 1918 virus might have survived in
bodies buried in permafrost intrigued Johan Hultin, a graduate student
at the University of Iowa. Hultin traveled to Brevig Mission, a remote
Inuit village in Alaska, seeking bodies of flu victims that had remained
frozen since burial. Although he found the lung samples he was looking
for, Hultin was never able to grow the flu virus from them. Then
in the early 1990s, Jeffrey Taubenberger, a pathologist at the
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, realized that the 1918 virus
might be found in tissue samples preserved from the autopsies
of soldiers who had died in the pandemic. Taubenberger finally
identified a sample of the virus on a slide of lung tissue from
Army Private Roscoe Vaughan, and he published his break-
through in 1997. Johan Hultin, then 72, decided to return to
Alaska some 50 years after his failed expedition there. At Bre-
vig Mission, Hultin found frozen specimens. He mailed them
to Taubenberger, who finally had enough samples to recon-
struct the entire genome of the 1918 virus.
Why was it important to resurrect the 1918 virus? Although
we discovered the genetic makeup and shape of the 1918 virus,
that does not tell us why the virus was so lethal. To know that,
you need to watch it infect animals; ferrets and guinea pigs are
used. Only through these experiments with the resur-
rected virus can scientists see it in action, understand
how it works, and hopefully find a cure.
Explain the 1976 swine flu outbreak. That year, sol-
diers at Fort Dix in New Jersey came down with an
unknown flu strain. One man died. The Centers for Disease Control
identified the 1976 flu strain as a descendant of the 1918 virus and
believed that the virus had jumped to humans from pigs. None of the
sick soldiers had had contact with swine. Public health officials worried
that this flu could spread like the 1918 virus. A vaccine was quickly for-
mulated, and the CDC recommended that all Americans be inoculated.
President Gerald Ford accepted the recommendation but drug compa-
nies, worried about side effects, pressed the government to indemnify
them against lawsuits. Sure enough, reports came in that right after vac-
cination some people had become ill or had a heart attack or stroke.
Behind the Mask
During the 1918 flu
pandemic an
American typist
takes no chances.