Research Symposium

BIO

Connor Smith is a freshman from Sarasota, Florida currently working towards a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry, as well as a minor in psychology. After undergrad, he plans to go to medical school with an ultimate goal of working in anesthesiology or cardiology. Connor is a Benacquisto scholarship recipient and an FSU Honors student. Prior to UROP, he had no research experience, but has grown as both an academic and a researcher under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Gabriel.

A History of Public Health and Opposition in the United States: Epidemic Response Across the 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

Modern epidemic response in the United States was largely designed by evaluating the problems and shortcomings of responses to previous epidemics and finding solutions to prevent these issues in the future. The 1976 swine flu incident in the United States was especially important in reshaping the response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic and is an underlying reason for political caution. By compiling information from government records, citizen accounts, and news articles, this project’s goal in building a timeline of significant changes of policy as a result of the unnecessary response of the 1976 swine flu was highly successful. This timeline traces back to the government’s relaxed response to the 1918 Spanish flu before jumping to intermediate policy changes and government panic leading up to and during the 1976 flu. Important policy changes, shifts in government and public views on pandemic response, and the resulting anti-vaccination argument are also included. This suggests that public policy can benefit from evaluating past mistakes or problems to streamline and improve pandemic responses, as seen in the case of COVID-19. While this project currently consists of a general analysis of the three aforementioned pandemics, future research can be done to look further into possible problems in COVID’s response that can be solved for future pandemics. Further analysis can also be used to evaluate the possible shortcomings of comparing response to flu-based pandemics to that of a different virus, like COVID-19.

Keywords: united states epidemic responses