Flu Deja Vu
Posted on Sep. 17, 2009

Michael Bugeja, the director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University of Science and Technology, regularly critiques the answers of our Editorial Roundtable Board of Contributors. Swine flu was a story that gave him his first full-time job in daily journalism in 1976, as he recounts below.

See Michael Bugeja's sidebar, “Tips to cover a potential pandemic,” also on this page.

I know about the swine flu fiasco of 1976 because as a young reporter, I broke a key element of the story out of Pierre, S.D., of all places.

If you want to bone up on what happened then, don’t take it from me; take it from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and read “Reflections on the 1976 Swine Flu Vaccination Program,” which discusses how corporations and media played a role in dooming that federal health mandate.

I’ll summarize two key points from that article:

-- The CDC had proposed legislation to compensate persons getting the vaccine if the shot caused any adverse reaction. But companies making the vaccine demanded indemnity against lawsuits, or else, and the government caved.

-- The inoculation program could not survive the media’s reporting of “cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) among persons receiving swine flu immunizations.”

The article doesn’t state that the CDC was aware of the link to GBS, which causes paralysis and can become life-threatening, but failed to disclose it, believing the risk of swine flu was greater.

Then as now, we deserved to make that decision for ourselves.

In the interest of disclosure, some personal history:

-- In 1976, after graduating from the journalism master’s program at South Dakota State University, I worked for a few months writing news releases on the swine flu vaccination program for the South Dakota Department of Communicable Diseases before being hired by United Press International as a “legislative reliefer,” another temporary job.

-- During a lull, I read a news release from the Department of Communicable Diseases about the percentage of the South Dakota population inoculated to date against swine flu. Rather than telephone the publicist, I left the statehouse bureau and walked to the department to fact-check the percentage myself.

-- When I arrived, a secretary informed me that “the swine flu shot was causing paralysis.”

I rushed back to the bureau, feeling I was an accomplice in writing releases that justified the inoculation program as “erring on the side of caution,” as the CDC advises to this day.

I decided to do an “enterprise” piece on my own time and then show the results to my bureau manager. I framed my own justification about the GBS story: The longer I waited, doing a traditional investigation, the more people would get the shot and perhaps experience adverse side-effects.

I telephoned a health official, identifying myself by name and company, and asked him if the swine flu shot was causing paralysis.

To which he replied, “Is the news out?”

“Well,” I quipped, “I’m reporting it.” (This, my friends, is called a lie of omission.)

He fell for the bait, giving me details, including the number of people hospitalized in the Midwest with GBS.

I wrote the story at home and then edited it on my next shift between weather and cattle markets, barrows and gilts, up a quarter, or down.

I showed the piece to my bureau manager. He was worried that a cub reporter was breaking what promised to be a national story, if true, and told me to contact his boss in Chicago, Jesse Bogue, for permission.

I telephoned Bogue, who happened to be in the middle of his retirement party. I could hear sounds of celebration in the background.

I disclosed what I did earlier, about my work with the health department and how I learned about the GBS link, first from the secretary off the record and then the details from the public health official involved in the vaccination program.

Bogue could have waited another hour until retired officially, letting his successor deal with my conflict of interest.

He paused for about 30 seconds. “Run it,” he said. “But don’t disclose the name of the secretary no matter what they do to you.”

I filed the story. Our competitor, The Associated Press, contacted the health official who had given me details. When he realized the CDC had not authorized anyone to disclose the GBS link, he clammed up.

The AP ran a story questioning mine, and that is how the story remained for 48 excruciating hours.

Rumor had it that I had invented the story -- a Sioux Falls television broadcaster had the temerity to say so out loud in a Fort Pierre bar, and we almost came to blows in Wild West fashion.

Finally at the bureau, I got a call from a senior reporter in UPI’s Atlanta office, and I gave him my notes. Within hours, the CDC organized a telephone conference with state health departments across the country and ended the inoculation program for the flu that never came.

The disclosure of the paralysis link was my best and, in some sense, my worst piece of reporting, a case study of conflict of interest. Essentially, I got the story by feigning to the health official that the GBS story was out when it wasn’t. For years I felt reporter’s guilt about how I got the scoop until I became a professor at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. In my ethics class was a doctoral student, Vicki Hesterman, who had co-authored “Walking Home” (Augsburg, 1982), a memoir about a woman who received the vaccine just before her honeymoon and who then contracted GBS. The book related the myriad agonies of paralysis brought on by GBS.

For the first time, I felt my reporting may have done someone somewhere some good, sparing perhaps dozens of the same agony the woman in the story endured. But my conscience still ached for the state health official who trusted me enough to share details about those who had contracted GBS and where. Ironically, had he not given me those hard facts, I doubt my senior colleague in Atlanta would ever have been able to penetrate the CDC’s reticence on the matter.

All I have in my faded yellow clipbook from that time is a fax from H.L. Stevenson, editor-in-chief then of UPI, who had read an account of our coverage published by a journalism professor (sweet irony!) in Editor & Publisher who criticized us for putting in the hands of a rookie such a story.

You can view the fax here, sent to the Lincoln, Neb., bureau because my swine flu disclosure earned me a permanent UPI job.

Two years ago, in response to the avian bird flu pandemic that also never came, I contacted the South Dakota health official again to see if I could go on record with our story. He had left public practice and didn’t want to comment officially by name but added that much had changed since the 1970s, “the time during which many of the vaccines that are still in use today were developed and introduced.”

Then he added: “I don’t think people’s skepticism with governmental vaccination programs today is necessarily about any CDC missteps during swine flu; government has deservedly earned it in other ways since.”

One of those ways is lack of disclosure to citizens who underwrite public health with their taxes.

In this regard, the CDC should keep in mind what journalists do: Truth, sooner or later, prevails. The only question is when, where, why how and by whom or what occurrence that truth will arrive.

It is not my intent to warn against getting the H1N1 vaccine. I probably will, erring as I did in 1976 on the side of caution. But I would rather err on the side of truth, knowing the risks beforehand and then making an informed decision.

Contemplating this dilemma for more than 30 years, I have come to believe that factual answers to hard questions do more to promote vaccination programs than assuming, as the CDC had done, that full disclosure about the risk was not in the public interest.