One could imagine tolerating that bad a reaction rate for a preventative to a desperate disease. But what other vaccine in common use has had a reaction rate this bad?
I think some of the early (pre 1870) smallpox vaccines had adverse reaction rates that bad or worse, and even the modern small pox vaccine has a relatively high adverse reaction rate. This is part of the reason smallpox is no longer on the standard schedule, the other part is that your chances of catching smallpox are somewhere between small and non-existent.