Three elderly people in Pittsburgh, all of whom had heart problems, died suddenly after receiving swine flu shots.

From Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata.  Page 163.   

This was written in 1999, a near generation before Covid-19 and yet all the same misteps were made then as well.  Or, more properly, despite what we learned from the Swine Flu experience in 1985, we made all the same mistakes again in 2020, as if the CDC had learned nothing.

Three elderly people in Pittsburgh, all of whom had heart problems, died suddenly after receiving swine flu shots. All had gotten their shots at the same clinic. All had had shots from the same batch of vaccine. And, reported the Pittsburgh Press, that same batch of vaccine had been delivered to twelve other clinics in Allegheny County as well as to clinics in twenty cities across the country.

The media swarmed to the Pittsburgh clinic, and the next day, October 12, Dr. Cyril Wecht, the Allegheny County coroner, fanned the flames of fear, going before CBS television cameras and saying that a bad batch of vaccine “is definitely a possibility that must be considered.”

Allegheny County suspended its swine flu campaign. And so did nine states. The press began a national body count.

Some newspapers went over the top. The New York Post, for example, ran a story on October 14 headlined “The Scene at the Pennsylvania Death Clinic” that spoke of a seventy-five-year-old woman who “winced at the sting of the hypodermic,” then had “taken a few feeble steps and dropped dead.” On October 25, the paper suggested that Carlo Gambino, the mobster, had been killed by the Mafia using a swine flu shot as the deadly weapon.

As reports of the death toll proliferated, Dr. David Sencer, at the Centers for Disease Control, tried to stem the rising tide of fear. He held a press conference on the evening of October 12, saying that there was no evidence that the vaccine was at fault. The deaths were most likely only coincidentally associated with the vaccination. But the government would, of course, investigate. “We are setting up a program to look into this in great depth to reassure everyone that this is not a problem due to the vaccine but just some of the inherent problems of providing preventative services to large numbers of people, particularly those who are elderly and have underlying health problems.”

It was the start of a tug-of-war between the Centers for Disease Control and the Pennsylvania coroner.

The next day, October 13, Wecht announced that autopsies on two of the three people had shown that they had died of heart problems. But, he said, the vaccine may have spurred those deaths. “We know that substances injected into the vascular system directly produce a more exaggerated and certainly a more rapid reaction than when those same substances are injected into the body fat or muscle mass.”

The Centers for Disease Control countered with its own figures on the likelihood of coincidental deaths, noting that among people aged seventy to seventy-four, there are 10 to 12 deaths per 100,000 people per day. So, of course, when you immunize people of that age, some, by chance, would die the same day. But that does not mean they died because they were immunized.