No no no. They didn't realize there was not going to be an outbreak till months later.
We can go off of Ekklesian's opinion are the facts that were gathered by the guy who investigated the incident back in the 70's.
How much did the coincidental deaths that you mentioned affect public perception of the immunization campaign and uptake of the vaccine?
Well, really what affected it more was the absence of disease! Nobody was getting the swine flu, so what, people felt, was the point?
Why was the program discontinued?
People were getting a little antsy—should we really be doing this? And then there was the identification of the rare side effect, Guillain-Barré Syndrome [in some vaccine recipients]—this is an ascending paralysis that occasionally occurs after viral infection and has not been associated with any other influenza vaccine [
nor has it been found to be associated with the COVID-19 vaccines]. But it does appear, from the best assessments, that this was a rare side effect, maybe one in a million. And that occurrence was enough.
That, along with the fact that there was no disease, led to the formal abandonment of the program. That was in December.
Then, what happened, as you know, there was a change in presidency—Jimmy Carter was inaugurated in 1977. There was an outbreak of influenza in a nursing home in Florida, not the swine flu, but A/Victoria influenza, the other flu that had been circulating. And the question came up: Should we start using this vaccine we have, to protect against A/Victoria? Because all the vaccines that had been produced that year were combination vaccines, meant to protect against both swine type and A/Victoria.
Did they end up using those doses for the other flu?
Yes, they did.
[Editor’s note: And for A/Victoria influenza, at least, the combined vaccine seems to have worked.]