I've seen claims before that the CDC's response to the 1976 H1N1 epidemic had long-term negative public health consequences, but after a few minutes of looking for evidence of this, I'm not sure it's true.
In the fall of 1976, based on fears that a January outbreak of swine flu was going to become a 1918-scale pandemic in the coming season, the CDC vaccinated around 25% of the American populace. However, new cases of H1N1 weren't appearing, people were developing Guillain–Barré syndrome after being vaccinated, Ford lost the election, and the whole program was abandoned. The received wisdom (e.g. this Discover article) seems to be that this was viewed as a disaster and increased distrust of government vaccination campaigns.
From what I can tell from this article on Influenza Pandemics of the 20th Century and the the CDC's 2006 reflections on the vaccination program, though, the public health officials involved in the campaign feel like they reacted reasonably given the information they had? (Most of the world did not mount mass vaccination campaigns, and it was not an unusually bad flu season.)
Anyway, leaving this as a comment rather than an answer, since this was an overreaction to the H1N1 strain that existed, but I don't know if it was an overreaction to the information accessible in February 1976, and it's not clear that it had terrible consequences.
It's a bit different than what you are looking for, and historical cases are earlier than would be relevant directly, but there were certainly many documented cases of pogroms happening during various epidemics during the middle ages and Renaissance when a minority group (usually Jews) were blamed and massacred.
This isn't quite what has happened so far, but I can certainly imagine a case where a modern pandemic could similarly exacerbate class or racial tensions leading to violence.
This does seem unusually bad, so would qualify. Strongly upvoted. This makes me more sympathetic to people who were claiming that anti-Chinese xenophobia was the biggest problem with the novel coronavirus, even though I still think they made the wrong call even ex ante.
I'm fine with examples from relatively early historical pandemics, because the current situation is an unusually large upheaval compared to say the Hong Kong flu, so to get a historical sense of what could happen we need more examples of "unusually fast+large upheavals in history", and I think earlier on maybe people (including myself) are over-indexing a bit on "recent epidemics that are less lethal" (so less good as a reference class) as well as the Spanish flu (which is only one data point).
Though that said when I searched for "pogroms during epidemics," this paper claims that after the first Black Death, there wasn't much evidence for plague-based pogroms and other outgroup violence, even during subsequent plagues.
That is interesting. My general model is that pre-modern Europeans didn't need much of an excuse to start killing Jews, so if true this would be a substantial update for me.
There are various things I could come up with that might start explaining the difference, but I'd want to actually read the paper first.
Okay, here's the conclusion of the paper (emphasis mine):
The rest of the paper documents many epidemics he looked at (going back to before common era Athens and Rome) which did not end up in the expected violence. I think I have a more balanced view of whether it's possible for excess panic to cause major problems during a pandemic now, and I'm still surprised that there isn't more.
I'd like to see
a) a study of how much those incidences of outgroup violence were primarily a result of panic (as opposed to eg. opportunists, since during the Black Death Christians appeared at least as invested in confiscating a lot of possessions from Jewish people) and
b) a similarly comprehensive study of how many epidemics/pandemics resulted in bad things happening from insufficient worry or officials hiding information.
I also weakly suspect that some cases of a) and b) are tied together, eg. excess panic/panic synchronization happening because officials have lied about the situation earlier on.
Why was this comment downvoted? :O
I only came to this thread by accident and saw that I'm apparently the culprit (it showed a weak downvote). I don't even remember reading this comment nor the thread and I rarely downvote people anyway. Maybe I misclicked while I scrolled through random comments yesterday. I hope that doesn't happen too often. :)
No worries! :)
Yeah perhaps I should be less credulous?
Practically all previous pandemics were far enough back in history that their applicability is unclear. I think it's unfair to discount your example because of that, because every other positive or negative example can be discounted the same way.