[Jstor.org] Microbiologist Maurice Hilleman saw it coming, so the country made 40 million doses of the vaccine within months.
Key paragraph: Hilleman knew the strain would be introduced to America by travelers returning from epidemic areas in the Far East. It was a matter of when, not if. At the time, people couldn’t yet cross the globe in a matter of 24 hours, so unlike today, American doctors, microbiologists and epidemiologists had a little more time to prepare. Hilleman concluded that the new flu would hit the US in the fall of 1957. At the time he was able to work directly with vaccine manufacturers—bypassing “the bureaucratic red tape” as he called it—so he asked them to start making the vaccines. The Public Health Service released the first cultures of the Asian influenza virus to manufacturers on May 12, 1957
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