In the end, the actual number of pandemic swine flu casualties in 1976 was not 1 million, but one. Dr. Harvey Fineberg, who authored the government’s 1978 comprehensive postmortem of NIAID’s response to that fake pandemic, told the WHO Bulletin: “In ’76, the virus was detected in a single military installation, at Fort Dix, New Jersey. In the ensuing weeks and months, not one related swine flu case was reported elsewhere in New Jersey, the USA or anywhere else in the world. . . . At the same time, political decision-makers consistently thought that the scientists were giving them no choice but to go ahead with a mass immunization programme.”9
NIH’s influenza and flu vaccine expert senior bacteriologist and virologist Dr. John Anthony Morris informed his HHS bosses that the flu scare was a farce and that NIAID’s campaign was a boondoggle to promote a dangerous and ineffective flu vaccine for a greedy industry. Dr. Morris had worked for thirty-six years at federal public health agencies beginning in 1940. His office, at the time of the 1976 “outbreak,” was a few doors down the hall from Tony Fauci’s. Morris served as the government’s chief vaccine officer and led research on the flu and flu vaccines for the Bureau of Biologics Standards (BBS) at NIH and later at FDA. Morris enjoyed a distinguished career researching viral respiratory diseases. When Dr. Morris protested the fraud, his direct superior ordered him to stand down, advising Morris “not to talk about this.”10 His NIH bosses threatened Dr. Morris with loss of employment and professional ruin if he failed to keep his mouth shut. When vaccine recipients began reporting adverse reactions, including Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), Dr. Morris disobeyed orders. Publicly declaring that there was zero evidence that the Fort Dix swine flu was contagious to humans, he reiterated, the vaccine could induce neurological side effects.11 In response, HHS officials confiscated Dr. Morris’s research materials, changed the laboratory locks, moved him to a small room with no telephone, reassigned his laboratory staff, forbade him to see visitors except with permission, and blocked his efforts to publish his findings.12 Finally, after months of threats and petty harassment, HHS fired Morris for insubordination, citing a long list of drummed-up charges, including failure to return library books on time.13
Over at CDC, scientist Dr. Michael Hatwick was also warning HHS bigwigs that the flu vaccine could cause widespread brain injuries.
The 1976 swine flu vaccine was so fraught with problems that HHS discontinued the jab after vaccinating 49 million Americans. According to news accounts, the incidence of flu was seven times greater among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. Furthermore, the vaccine caused some 500 cases of the degenerative nerve disease Guillain-Barré Syndrome, 32 deaths,14 more than 400 paralyzations, and as many as 4,000 other injuries.15
Public health officials pulled the vaccine. President Ford fired David Sencer.
American taxpayers ended up paying for the swine flu vaccine coming and going, through guaranteed profits for Merck at the front end and outlays for piles of lawsuits from vaccine injury victims on the other side.
The government paid $134 million for the swine flu vaccine program. Injured plaintiffs filed 1,604 lawsuits. By April 1985, the government had paid out $83,233,714 and spent tens of millions of dollars adjudicating and processing those claims.16 In 1987, Dr. Morris testified before Congress, “These figures give some idea of the consequences resulting from a program in which the federal government assumes liability of a product known to produce, in an indeterminate number of recipients, serious damage to health. . . . When I left the FDA in 1976, there was no available technique to measure, reliably and consistently, neurotoxicity or potency of most of vaccines then in use, including DTP vaccines. Today [1987], 11 years later, the situation remains essentially the same.”17 Dr. Morris’s research found that flu vaccines often induced fever in children and in pregnant women, and serious harm to the fetus. He worried that there were hidden risks for everyone because the vaccine was “literally loaded with extraneous bacteria.”18 According to Dr. Morris, “There is a great deal of evidence to prove that immunization of children does more harm than good.”19 In what serves as a concise epithet for his crosses, Dr. Morris stated, “There is a close tie between government scientists and manufacturing scientists. My results were hurting the market for flu vaccines.”20
In 1977, Dr. Morris instituted a wrongful dismissal suit. The court overturned all NIH’s charges against him. Subsequently a grievance committee unanimously found that his supervisors had harassed and wrongfully terminated Dr. Morris.21 A group of former FDA and NIH scientists endorsed Dr. Morris’s criticisms of the agency. The New York Times quoted a fellow scientist, B. G. Young, who characterized NIH’s reprisals against honest scientists as “suppression, harassment, and censorship of individual investigators. . . . I finally came to realize that you either had to compromise yourself or leave. Morris and (Bernice) Eddy are the real heroes in that place because they stayed and fought. The others voted with their feet and left.”22
Up until his death in July 2014, Dr. Morris remained an outspoken critic of CDC’s annual flu shot program. In 1979, Dr. Morris told the Washington Post, “It’s a medical rip-off. . . . I believe the public should have truthful information on the basis of which they can determine whether or not to take the vaccine. . . . I believe that given full information, they won’t take the vaccine.” Dr. Morris’s 2014 New York Times obituary reported his statement, “The producers of these [influenza] vaccines know they are worthless, but they go on selling them anyway.”23
Dr. B. G. Young told the New York Times that NIH’s industry-dominated culture at the vaccine division had driven away all the honest regulators—those willing to stand up to pharma. Dr. Fauci, in contrast, is the rare scientist who lasted fifty years at HHS. He has done so largely by aligning himself with NIH’s pharma overlords and carrying industry water.