Tuesday, April 28, 2009

I disobeyed a Presidential Order and survived the Swine Flu

IN 1976, President Gerald Ford ordered a nationwide vaccination program to prevent a swine flu epidemic.

Ford was acting on the advice of medical experts, who believed they were dealing with a virus potentially as deadly as the one that caused the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic. The virus surfaced in February at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis told his drill instructor that he felt tired and weak, although not sick enough to skip a training hike. Lewis was dead within 24 hours.
The autopsy revealed that Lewis had been killed by "swine flu," an influenza virus originating in pigs. By then several other soldiers had been hospitalized with symptoms. Government doctors became alarmed when they discovered that at least 500 soldiers on the base were infected without becoming ill.

My wife got the vaccination and immediately got sick. I was too busy building a GaAs development lab to get sick "on purpose". Turns out I was right. Within weeks reports started coming in of people developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease, right after taking the shot. Within two months, 500 people were affected, and more than 30 died of the nerve disease, but only Private Lewis died from the Swine Flu.

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