Meredith Hodnock

This is called a post-marketing surveillance study, and it's common for new drugs.

Basically, it's a trial period to make sure there aren't any side effects that are so rare the other smaller phases of the trial miss them.

Another retrospective study showed that of the nearly 1.5 million people who had the vaccine, a few hundred people reported any joint or muscle pain and 59 developed arthritis.

A similar number of people would have developed arthritis in a group of one and a half million people who hadn't had the vaccine.

But in the wake of all the other vaccine skepticism unfolding at the time, it was a good story.

How did all this media attention, what did it mean for your patients?

Were they starting to get worried?

Beyond the study, some patients were worried, confused.

Maybe they had unexplained symptoms they didn't understand or a health care system that they didn't trust.

And then some doctors were confused too.

They were getting mixed messages from the government.

The CDC recommended that only people at high risk for getting Lyme disease should even consider getting the vaccine.

Lyme disease was dismissed as a yuppie problem, a frivolous concern, and the vaccine, which could cost hundreds of dollars, was a luxury.

Everybody else was doing just fine, wearing long socks, doing tick checks, and taking antibiotics if they caught it.

And then the lawsuit started.

It all happened so fast.

Within months of Limerick's going on the market, a law firm in Philadelphia sued the drug company, claiming over 100 people experienced bad reactions from the vaccine, often citing crippling arthritis.

and more lawsuits followed that.

The pressure ratcheted up, and the FDA called back the advisory panel in 2001 to go over all of the safety data again.

Reports from the time say the meeting was riotous.