Quote:
Originally Posted by Wyseguy
During the Spanish Flu, researchers and health workers in the United States and Europe were confidently devising vaccines and immunizing hundreds of thousands of people in what amounted to a medical experiment on the grandest scale. What were the vaccines they came up with? Did they do anything to protect the immunized and halt the spread of the disease?
Read the "History of Vaccines" There were vaccines for the Spanish Flu. Experimental (hmm) as they were.
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Ummmm, not quite:
In the deadly Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19, investigators attempted to develop vaccines to prevent influenza, though they had not yet correctly identified the causative pathogen. A variety of killed whole cell bacterial vaccines were tested; these vaccines included Bacillus influenzae (now know as Haemophilus influenzae) and strains of pneumococcus, streptococcus, staphylococcus, and Moraxella catarrhalis bacteria. These vaccines
would certainly not have prevented influenza infection--as we know now, the pandemic was caused by a new strain of the influenza A virus.
Influenza viruses would not be isolated and identified until the 1930s,
and the first commercial influenza vaccines were not licensed in the United States until the 1940s.