Swine flu: Pandemic or hype? Utahn still struggles with deadly disease

MILLVILLE, Cache County — Like millions of Americans, Rick Morgan was a bit skeptical of all the talk about the H1N1 virus — that is, until it almost killed him.

"I thought it was a bit overblown," he remembers.

It was October 2009, and Utahns were lining up to be vaccinated by the thousands. But Morgan wasn't part of the "eligible" group, and he certainly didn't consider himself "high risk."

A researcher in the Space Dynamics Lab at Utah State University, his mind was often more engaged on what was happening in the heavens, rather than here on planet Earth. But on Wednesday, Oct. 21, he woke up focused on how ill he felt.

"Rick doesn't stay home from work, ever," said his wife, Marie. "But he woke up so sick he couldn't get out of bed. I remember he had a fever of 103 and a cough."

He hunkered down in bed, frustrated to be missing work. He had no idea how bad things were about to get.

Now, more than a year later, the H1N1 scare has all but subsided. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control, flu numbers were below normal in February. What's more, thousands of vials of H1N1 vaccine are expiring every day across the country.

In Salt Lake County alone, 1,500 doses will be trashed this week. Nationally, an estimated 71.5 million doses will be discarded if they are not used before they expire.

The swine flu vaccine push, which cost the U.S. government $1.6 billion, was the most ambitious immunization campaign in American history. There are no estimates on how much money will be lost when the unused doses are discarded, but the BBC has reported that the UK government will lose as much as $150 million on its 34 million unused doses.

To some, the swine flu threat seems like the pandemic that never happened. Others have questioned why so much money was spent on a public health outbreak that never materialized.

But local officials see it differently, and the CDC warns that another outbreak could be coming.

For survivors of the H1N1 virus like Morgan, there's no question the public health system did the right thing. For him, the flu was as real and as deadly as the World Health Organization initially warned.

"Public education and vaccine programs mitigated the effect quite a bit, but it's hard to quantify," says Dr. David Sundwall, the director of the Utah Department of Health. "How do you measure what didn't happen?"