Spanish Influenza Quotes

The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

The three most acute months of the Spanish influenza crisis left the survivors of Linares and of the whole world with scars that would never heal and voids that would never be filled.

Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner. “Oh no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things…

The Spanish Influenza did not originate in Spain. In fact the first recorded case was in the United States, in Kansas, on March 9th, 1918. Beware the Ides of March. But because Spain was neutral in World War I, it did not sensor reports of the disease to the public. To tell the truth then, is to risk being remembered by its fiction. Countless countries laid blame to one another. What the US called the Spanish Influenza, Spain called the French Flu, or the Naples Soldier. What Germans dubbed the Russian Pest, the Russians called Chinese Flu.

Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity.

No nation had wanted to report the true number of deaths. Only Spain, who had remained neutral in the conflict, shared news of the illness, which is why it ended up being called the Spanish influenza.

However, as bad as things were, the worst was yet to come, for germs would kill more people than bullets. By the time that last fever broke and the last quarantine sign came down, the world had lost 3-5% of its population.

When we think of a pandemic, we often conjure images of deadly infectious diseases that spread rapidly across countries causing unimaginable human suffering (like the Black Death, the Spanish influenza, AIDS, or the ongoing COVID-19 crisis). The West is currently suffering from such a devastating pandemic, a collective malady that destroys people’s capacity to think rationally. Unlike other pandemics where biological pathogens are to blame, the current culprit is composed of a collection of bad ideas, spawned on university campuses, that chip away at

The same sense of hubris affects us today as affected the generation that was blindsided by the Spanish Influenza. A modern epidemic comparable with the great ones of the past is a thing more akin to science fiction to most people living today rather than something seen as a realistic possibility.

It still can be. The same sense of hubris affects us today as affected the generation that was blindsided by the Spanish Influenza. A modern epidemic comparable with the great ones of the past is a thing more akin to science fiction to most people living today rather than something seen as a realistic possibility.

the disturbing possibility that the Spanish Lady might stage a return visit,

It's just my luck,” he said gloomily. “It's the kind of thing that couldn't happen to anyone but me. Damned fools! Where's the sense in shutting the theatres, even if there is influenza about? They let people jam against one another all day in the stores. If that doesn't hurt them why should it hurt them to go to theatres? Besides, it's all infernal nonsense about this thing. I don't believe there is such a thing as Spanish influenza. People get colds in their heads and think they're dying. It's all a fake scare.

And although better coverage of the outbreak’s evolution in the press couldn’t have stopped the influenza virus, a single newspaper headline in Philadelphia saying “Don’t Go to Any Parades; for the Love of God Cancel Your Stupid Parade” could have saved hundreds of lives. It would have done a lot more than those telling people, “Don’t Get Scared!” Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine. This failure is in the past. Journalists and editors had their reasons. Risking jail time is no joke. But learning from this breakdown in truth-telling is important because the fourth estate can’t fail again. We are fortunate today to have organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that track how diseases are progressing and report these findings. In the event of an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu, they will be wonderful resources. I hope we’ll be similarly lucky to have journalists who will be able to share necessary information with the public. The public is at its strongest when it is well informed. Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.

In many ways, it is hard for modern people living in First World countries to conceive of a pandemic sweeping around the world and killing millions of people, and it is even harder to believe that something as common as influenza could cause such widespread illness and death.

At least etymologically speaking, when we talk about influenza we are talking about the influences that shape the world everywhere at once. Today’s bird flu or swine flu viruses or the 1918 Spanish flu virus are not the real influenza — not the underlying influence — but only its symptom.

in a letter to the New York Times, Dr. Hans Neumann from the New Haven Department of Health noted that based on the projected scale of the immunizations, within two days of getting a flu shot, about 2,300 people would have a stroke and 7,000 would have a heart attack. “Why?” he asked. “Because that is the number statistically expected, flu shots or no flu shots.” Likewise, in the week following a flu vaccine, another 9,000 people would contract pneumonia, of whom 900 would die. These would certainly occur after a flu shot, but not as a consequence of it. “Yet,” wrote Neumann, “can one expect a person who received a flu shot at noon and who that same night had a stroke not to associate somehow the two in his mind?” Grandma got the flu vaccine in the morning, and she was dead in the afternoon. Although association does not equal causation, this thinking could lead to a public backlash against vaccinations that would threaten future programs.

Despite the name, Spanish flu struck the entire world — that’s what made it a pandemic instead of simply an epidemic. It was not the first influenza pandemic, nor the most recent (1957 and 1968 also saw pandemics), but it was by far the most deadly. Whereas AIDS took roughly twenty-four years to kill 24 million people, the Spanish flu killed as many in twenty- four weeks.

least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the ‘Spanish Lady’. Strikingly, the global peak of mortality was in October and November 1918.

The new collectives that farming supported gave rise to new diseases–the so-called ‘crowd diseases’ such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis and influenza. Humans had always been susceptible to infectious disease–leprosy and malaria were causing misery long before the farming revolution–but these were adapted to surviving in small, dispersed human populations. Among their tricks for doing so were not conferring total immunity on a recovered host, so that he or she could be infected again, and retreating to another host–a so-called ‘animal reservoir’–when humans were scarce. Both strategies helped ensure that they maintained a sufficiently large pool of susceptible hosts.

the Spanish press doesn’t have the same censorship that the French, German, and British governments have imposed on their newspapers.” “Correct again, Lilly,” said Noble. “You can add American government censorship of the press, also. As far as I can see, in A.I. Office communications regarding The War, there is no Spanish press censorship at all. There was even wide press coverage in the last week of Spanish King Alphonse XIII and his family’s serious illnesses with the grippe.” “Both the Allies and the Central Powers don’t want to let on there has been any reduction in fighting capacity. So, very little appears in their respective newspapers. The Spanish, however, are free to report all the various details of the influenza epidemic. It would be simple wrong to conclude the epidemic is ‘Spanish’ in origin.

Since the body does a better job of fighting infection when it is a few degrees hotter, might reducing the fever lead to a worse outcome for the patient? A group from McMaster University in Canada looked at what happens in a large group of people when some of them—infected with, say, influenza—take medicine to reduce their fever. Once they feel better, patients with the flu get out of bed and start to socialize, spreading the virus. On a population level the effect is rather drastic. The McMaster group concluded that the practice of frequently treating fevers with medication enhances the transmission of influenza by at least 1 percent. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but remember that as many as 49,000 people die from the flu each year in the United States. If you plug the McMaster estimates into these flu numbers, almost 500 deaths per year in the U.S. (and perhaps many more elsewhere) could be prevented by avoiding fever medication during the treatment of influenza.

Bells Screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in midair, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur-colored light ex-ploded through the black windowpane and flashed away in darkness. Miranda waking from a dreamless sleep asked without expecting an answer, “What is happening?” for there was a bustle of voices and footsteps in the corridor, and a sharpness in the air; the far clamour went on, a furious exasperated shrieking like a mob in revolt. The light came on, and Miss Tanner said in a furry voice, “Hear that? They’re celebrating . It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.” Her hands trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup, stopped to listen, held the cup out to Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing, “My country, ’tis of thee…” Sweet land… oh terrible land of this bitter world where the sound of rejoicing was a clamour of pain, where ragged tuneless old women, sitting up waiting for their evening bowl of cocoa, were singing, “Sweet land of Liberty-” “Oh, say, can you see?” their hopeless voices were asking next, the hammer strokes of metal tongues drowning them out. “The war is over,” said Miss Tanner, her underlap held firmly, her eyes blurred. Miranda said, “Please open the window, please, I smell death in here.

least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the ‘Spanish Lady’.

Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the crowded American troopships.

Ironically, it was not the flu that actually killed people but the way in which it weakened them in ways that allowed pneumonia or meningitis could set in.

As the early outbreak at Fort Riley suggested, the primary breeding ground for the influenza consisted of army camps that were springing up all over America in the early days of 1918. America had entered World War I the previous October, and many young men were anxious to do their part and join the fight.  As a result, the camps soon became overcrowded with recruits and service veterans brought in from all over the country to train them.

Since that time there have been numerous epidemics of the disease. In 1889 and 1890 the disease was epidemic over practically the entire civilized world. Three years later there was another flare-up of the disease. Both times the epidemic spread widely over the United States. Although the recent epidemic is called ‘Spanish influenza,’ investigation has shown that it did not originate in Spain.  We now know that there was an undue prevalence of influenza in the United States for several years preceding the recent great pandemic. Because the disease occurred in mild form, and because the public mind was focused on the war, this increased prevalence of the disease escaped attention. Not until the epidemic appeared in severe form in Boston in September, 1918, did it excite any special interest.” - U.S. Public Health Service Report, prepared by Surgeon General Rupert Blue

the Indians who were our neighbors, they were only six miles away. So Dad and the city marshal rode up there one day to see how things were going at the Indian camps and they were horrified at what they saw. After an Indian died, his family and friends would sit around chanting him to the Happy Hunting Grounds and they’d spend all night there. And, by that time, they were all exposed, everybody had the flu. Ultimately, it killed about half the Indians.

In 1918 and 1919 came the Great Influenza, the Spanish Flu.  The only global pandemic in modern times.  Fifty million to a hundred million dead.  How did Tibet fare this time, you ask?” McAlister’s face was stoic, immobile. Suddenly angry, Undertaker said, “No. You don’t ask, Dr. McAlister; you don’t ask because you already know.  Tibet was barely touched.  A few sick, no one reported dead.

In the meantime, in Spain the virus picked up its name. • • • Spain actually had few cases before May, but the country was neutral during the war. That meant the government did not censor the press, and unlike French, German, and British newspapers—which printed nothing negative, nothing that might hurt morale—Spanish papers were filled with reports of the disease, especially when King Alphonse XIII fell seriously ill. The disease soon became known as “Spanish influenza” or “Spanish flu,” very likely because only Spanish newspapers were publishing accounts of the spread of the disease that were picked up in other countries.

Literally. On October 1, 117 people died of Spanish flu in Philadelphia. Still, on October 6, the Philadelphia Inquirer peppily reported that the best way to avoid the disease was to: Live a clean life. Do not even discuss influenza … Worry is useless. Talk of cheerful things instead of the disease.33

the Spanish influenza epidemic had severely depressed box office receipts, as theaters in many cities were closed by government fiat and frightened moviegoers stayed home to avoid exposure to crowds. By 1919, the epidemic was tapering off, but the paranoia lingered. (Lillian Gish, who just barely survived a terrifying bout of flu before the filming of Broken Blossoms, claimed that Griffith refused to come within ten feet of her during rehearsals.) And as the 1920s began, the country was facing a postwar recession that would further complicate the economics of an industry heavily dependent on the free flow of disposable income among consumers nationwide.

The natural reservoir of influenza is generally considered to be birds, especially waterbirds. The big giveaway that a certain species plays the role of reservoir for a certain pathogen is that it doesn’t get sick from it.

Spain actually had few cases before May, but the country was neutral during the war. That meant the government did not censor the press, and unlike French, German, and British newspapers—which printed nothing negative, nothing that might hurt morale—Spanish papers were filled with reports of the disease, especially when King Alphonse XIII fell seriously ill. The disease soon became known as “Spanish influenza” or “Spanish flu,” very likely because only Spanish newspapers were publishing accounts of the spread of the disease that were picked up in other countries.

To a large degree, the extent of the devastation that the flu caused on American cities depended on how they reacted to it. Those that took prompt action and made good choices had more limited devastation than others.

Spain actually had few cases before May, but the country was neutral during the war. That meant the government did not censor the press, and unlike French, German, and British newspapers—which printed nothing negative, nothing that might hurt morale—Spanish papers were filled with reports of the disease, especially when King Alphonse XIII fell seriously ill. The disease soon became known as “Spanish influenza” or “Spanish flu,” very likely because only Spanish newspapers were publishing accounts of the spread of the disease that were picked up in other countries.

They read the words of Colonel Philip Doane, the officer in charge of health at the country’s shipyards, who told the Associated Press, “The so-called Spanish influenza is nothing more or less than old-fashioned grippe.

Spain actually had few cases before May, but the country was neutral during the war. That meant the government did not censor the press, and unlike French, German, and British newspapers—which printed nothing negative, nothing that might hurt morale—Spanish papers were filled with reports of the disease, especially when King Alphonse XIII fell seriously ill.

The disease soon became known as “Spanish influenza” or “Spanish flu,” very likely because only Spanish newspapers were publishing accounts of the spread of the disease that were picked up in other countries.

In the summer of 1918 in the U.S., the Spanish influenza first touched someone in Philadelphia. Americans were hoping for an end to the war and the return of their surviving fathers and sons. Many of the nearly 2 million citizens of Philadelphia flocked to theaters to see vaudeville, plays, and big events and concerts, exchanging occasional coughs. Nobody had paid attention to the fact that 8 million Spaniards were sick and dying from a strange new disease named the “Spanish influenza” or that people in Boston had come down with the same thing. The alarm bells were silent.

I have dwelt at length on famines because they offer such an outstanding example of British colonial malfeasance. One could have cited epidemic disease as well, which constantly laid Indians low under British rule while the authorities stood helplessly by. To take just the first four years of the twentieth century, as Durant did: 272,000 died of plague in 1901, 500,000 in 1902, 800,000 in 1903, and 1 million in 1904 the death toll rising every year. During the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, 125 million cases of ‘flu were recorded (more than a third of the population), and India’s fatality rate was higher than any Western country’s: 12.5 million people died. As the American statesman (and three-time Democratic presidential candidate) William Jennings Bryan pointed out, many Britons were referring to the deaths caused by plague as ‘a providential remedy for overpopulation’. It was ironic, said Bryan, that British rule was sought to be justified on the grounds that ‘it keeps the people from killing each other, and the plague praised because it removes those whom the Government has saved from slaughter!’.

Hopkirk, like many physicians of his day, also prescribed quinine to treat the flu. “In quinine,” he wrote with great certainty, “we have a drug that not only controls fever-producing processes allied to fermentations, but also exerts a definite anti-toxic action on the specific virus of influenza itself.

In two polio epidemics in the preceding decade, public health officials had all but closed down the city. But now Copeland did nothing. Three days later, as hospitals began filling with influenza cases, he made influenza and pneumonia reportable diseases, while simultaneously stating that “other bronchial diseases and not the so-called Spanish influenza are said to be responsible for the illness of the majority of persons who were reported to be ill with influenza. . . .” A few days more and even Copeland could no longer deny reality. People could see disease all about them. Finally he warned, “The health department is prepared to compel patients who may be a menace to the community to go to hospitals.” He also assured all concerned “that the disease is not getting away from the control of the health department but is decreasing.

In addition to antigenic drift, there is a larger change that the flu virus can undergo, antigenic shift, and that’s how we get our flu pandemics. During this shift, viral proteins assume an entirely new structure, and the virus is said to be “novel.” These novel viruses—which most often arise when animal and human viruses share and swap their genes—are like entirely new criminals, not old ones in disguise. This makes them sneakier, more prolific, and perhaps more deadly. Antigenic shift generated the deadly 1918 influenza virus and the swine flu outbreak of 2009.

In 1918, the Spanish flu killed about 2.7 percent of the world's population. [60] The risk of an outbreak of influenza against which we do not have a vaccine remains a threat constant, which we should take extremely seriously. During the first months of 2009, thousands of people died from swine flu. For two weeks, it was a recurring topic on the news. However, unlike Ebola in 2014, the number of cases was not doubling, not even increasing in a linear fashion. Some researchers concluded that the flu was not as aggressive as the first warning signs had indicated. However, journalists continued to stoke fear for several weeks.

The Purple Death was actually part of a great wave of influenza, a lethal virus that swept across America and around the world starting in the spring of 1918. A second, even deadlier wave of influenza appeared in late summer and autumn of 1918, and a third wave continued into 1919. This highly contagious disease, later widely known as Spanish flu, killed an estimated 675,000 Americans in one year, according to historian and professor Alfred Crosby. Consider this perspective: more Americans died from the flu in this short time than all the U.S. soldiers who died fighting in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Indeed, the Spanish flu killed as many Americans in about a year as did HIV/AIDS, the most notorious epidemic of modern times, in more than thirty years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the estimated number of deaths from diagnosed HIV infection classified as AIDS in the United States since the first reported death in 1981 through 2014 was 678,509—about the same number that died of Spanish flu from 1918 to 1919.

Societies, especially in the developed world, were thought to be on the verge of becoming invulnerable to new plagues. Unfortunately, this expectation has proved to be spectacularly misplaced. Well into the twenty-first century smallpox remains the only disease to have been successfully eradicated. Worldwide, infectious diseases remain leading causes of death and serious impediments to economic growth and political stability. Newly emerging diseases such as Ebola, Lassa fever, West Nile virus, avian flu, Zika, and dengue present new challenges, while familiar afflictions such as tuberculosis and malaria have reemerged, often in menacing drug-resistant forms. Public health authorities have particularly targeted the persisting threat of a devastating new pandemic of influenza such as the “Spanish lady” that swept the world with such ferocity in 1918 and 1919.

Generation after generation, Forsyth County remained 'all white,' even as the Great War, the Spanish influenza, World War II, and the civil rights movement came and went, and as kudzu crept over the remnants of black Forsyth. The people of the country, many descended from the lynchers and night riders, shook their heads as the South changed around them. They read about the clashes in Montgomery, and Savannah, and Selma, and felt proud of their county's old-fashioned ways, its unspoiled beauty, and a peacefulness that they saw as a direct result of having 'run the n*****s out.' But now and again throughout the century, whenever someone intentionally or unwittingly violated the racial ban, white men could be counted on to rise up like they always had and drive the intruders away. Years might pass between such episodes, but each time it happened, Georgians were reminded that while the racial cleansing of 1912 seemed like ancient history, in truth, it had never really ended. In truth, many in Forsyth believed that 'racial purity' was their inheritance and birthright. And like their fathers' fathers' fathers, they saw even a single black face as a threat to their entire way of life.

The 2009 “pandemic,” which was not really a pandemic at all, taught us that language is both a weapon and a handicap when waging a campaign against influenza.

In more recent history, we learn from other viruses, including Measles, Ebola, Rabies, Herpes, how important it is to respond immediately to prevent the spread of infection. I was shocked when I learned more about the influenza pandemic, otherwise known as the Spanish Flu of 1918–1919. It began in the US, swiftly traveled across the world, and killed more people than any disease before or since.

Robert Graves, the poet and British Army officer, was in London, too, still shaky from the German metal he had received in his chest and thigh the year before. His mother-in-law contracted influenza, but deceived her physician in order to make the rounds of the latest London plays with her son, Tony, on leave from France. She died July 13: “her chief feeling was one of pleasure that Tony had got his leave prolonged on her account.” On the day she died, Grave’s friend and fellow poet, Sigfried Sassoon, who had been shot through the throat in 1917, was shot through the head while on patrol in No-Man’s-Land. He recovered. Tony was killed two months later.27 Yes, the war was much more engrossing than Spanish flu.

Spanish influenza had rounded the globe in four months following its appearance in the United States and fully earned a promotion from epidemic to pandemic. It had infected so many that, for all its mildness, it had doubtlessly killed tens of thousands already. In its next wave it would kill millions.

When did the pandemic end? That is more difficult to say, for while flu pandemics often begin abruptly, they normally disappear only after several renewals of virulency and then a long tailing off. The pandemic of Spanish influenza subsided and sank below the level of general and even scientific perception in the United States and almost everywhere else in the world in spring 1919.

But the 1920 edition of the Spanish influenza virus was an attenuated variant of the original strain, and the human population was more resistent than in 1918 and 1919.

The pandemic of Spanish influenza is easier to measure if it is restricted to the years of 1918 and 1919 and its farewell performance of 1920 is excluded.

It seems that the returns of pandemic flu, every 30 or 40 years, are arbitrary. The return in 1918 happened to come in the midst of a world war, with all its crowds and migrations, and perhaps that coincidence created Spanish influenza. Perhaps, but can we be sure that crowds and migrations have much to do with increasing the virulency of flu? There is the annoying fact that two of the last three pandemics, those of 1889–1890 and 1957, appear to have originated not among the most cosmopolitan of the world—the citizens of New York or Panama City—but among the relatively isolated and static populations of the interior of Asia.24

In its first Spanish influenza pamphlet, issued in September, the USPHS recommended that those nursing flu patients wear gauze masks.37 Soon laymen decided that what was a sensible caution in the sickroom would be just as sensible in every situation. Gauze masks became a common sight in the streets and department stores of communities in the eastern United States. People could and did honestly believe that a few layers of gauze would keep out flu bugs, just as screens kept the flies off the front porch. The influenza virus itself is, of course, so infinitely tiny that it can pass through any cloth, no matter how tightly woven, but a mask can catch some of the motes of dust and droplettes of water on which the virus may be riding. However, to be even slightly effective during a flu epidemic masks must be worn at all times when people are together, at home and at work and in between, must be of a proper and probably uncomfortable thickness, must be tied firmly, and must be washed and dried at least once daily. Enforcement of such conditions is impossible and so the communities where masking was compulsory during the Spanish influenza pandemic almost always had health records the same as those of adjacent communities without masking.

The third explanation for 1918’s lethality is that the flu virus triggered an overreactive immune response that turned the body against itself.

Today, influenza kills fewer than 0.1 percent of those who catch it. Nearly everyone recovers. In the 1918 pandemic most still recovered, but the death rate was twenty-five times greater. So many died in the U.S. that the average life expectancy in 1918 fell from fifty-one to thirty-nine years.

The most useful definition we have is that an epidemic is a severe local outbreak, while a pandemic is a global outbreak that makes people very sick, and spreads rapidly from a point of origin.

Antigenic shift generated the deadly 1918 influenza virus and the swine flu outbreak of 2009.

The history of the 1918 influenza pandemic is depressing reading. It’s like watching a horror movie that you have seen before. You know who the killer is, but you can’t jump in and save the victim.

Today, we know that viruses are submicroscopic entities twenty times smaller than a bacterium. They contain a core of genetic material covered by a protein capsule, and they reproduce exclusively within living cells.

We now think that the majority of deaths in the 1918 pandemic resulted from these secondary infections, not from the flu virus itself.

The National Institutes of Health in Maryland keeps samples of the 1918 flu virus in a freezer at an undisclosed location. It’s not easy to get anywhere near that locked freezer, let alone inside it. First, you have to get onto the campus of the NIH, which requires identification, a reason to be admitted, and a PhD, preferably in one of the life sciences. Once you get through and find the building, a guard has to buzz you in via an airlocked entrance with double doors. Inside, you will pass through a metal detector and then be firmly guided toward a locker, where your cell phone, thumb drive, computer, pager, and camera must be deposited. Then, and only then, will you be escorted farther into the building.

All this tinkering was creating superviruses that did not exist outside the lab and that might be more easily transmissible between different species, or more virulent, or more resistant to any influenza vaccine. Most researchers were insistent that these “gain of function” studies were needed to better understand how the flu virus might evolve, but the federal government saw things differently. These experiments were a security risk.

People don't talk much now about the Spanish influenza.... People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They'd sit as far from each other as they could. There was talk that Germans has caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to believe that, because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.

In medieval times, one-third of Europe’s population was decimated by the bubonic plague. Within a few centuries of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas had been wiped out by smallpox, measles, influenza, and other germs brought in by European invaders and colonists. More people died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic than were killed in the trenches of World War I. Malaria, presently among the most deadly infectious agents on the planet, is arguably the greatest mass murderer of all time. Experts estimate the disease has killed half of all people who have roamed the planet since the Stone Age.

On the American side, the shock of incomprehension was registered more brutally, by a devastating loss of population. It is impossible to estimate safely the numbers living in the Americas before European contact. Estimates vary between 13 million and 180 million. But everywhere there is evidence of a massive fall in the early years after the Europeans arrived. First of all, the Spaniards complained of depopulation in the first islands they colonised, Cuba and Hispaniola, and the figures bear them out: a census of Hispaniola in 1496 gave a figure of 1.1 million, but just eighteen years later the repartimiento of 1514 listed 22,000. Mexico witnessed a series of epidemics, beginning with the Spanish visit to their capital Tenochtitlán, which carried off most of the native population, and spread southward into Guatemala. Of the whole Caribbean, Joseph de Acosta was writing in the 1580s: ‘the habitation of which coasts is…so wasted and condemned that of thirty parts of the people that inhabit it there wants twenty-nine; and it is likely that the rest of the Indians will in short time decay’.3 Hernando de Soto led an expedition through Florida and the North American south-east in the mid-sixteenth century, finding a thick population of Indians, clustered in small cities, on the Mississippi river near modern Memphis. In 1682, when the area was next visited by white men (this time French), it was deserted. The diseases travelled faster than the spearheads of Spanish conquest: smallpox arrived in Peru in 1525, Francisco Pizarro in 1532. It had already killed Huayna Capac, the Inca, and many of his relations, and precipitated the dynastic struggle that the Spaniards were to turn to their own advantage. Thereafter, as everywhere, further epidemics, of typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles as well as more smallpox, ravaged the population. The Spanish were not notably humane conquerors, but they had no interest in genocide.

But in the rest of the world, the illness came to be called the Spanish flu, to Spain’s consternation. After all, the other countries of Europe, as well as the United States and countries in Asia, were hit too in that spring of 1918. Maybe the name stuck because Spain, still unaligned, did not censor its news reports, unlike other European countries. And so Spain’s flu was no secret, unlike the flu elsewhere.

Epidemics are local and occur in one place every 1 - 3 years, while Pandemics occur worldwide and happen at irregular intervals of several decades.

The 1918 influenza pandemic (also known as the Spanish Flu) was the most severe pandemic in recent history. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. It’s estimated that about 500 million people—one-third of the world’s population—became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide, with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. This virus is still with us today, and is the reason for our annual flu shots.

The small town of Gunnison, Colorado, lies at the bottom of the valley carved by the Gunnison River into the Rocky Mountains. It is now crossed by the Colorado stretch of U.S. Highway 50, but in 1918, the town was mainly supplied by train and two at best mediocre roads. When the 1918–19 influenza pandemic reached Colorado as an unwelcome stowaway on a train carrying servicemen from Montana to Boulder, the town of Gunnison took decisive action. As the November 1, 1918, edition of the Gunnison News-Champion documents, a Dr. Rockefeller from the nearby town of Crested Butte was "given entire charge of both towns and county to enforce a quarantine against all the world". He instituted a strict reverse quarantine regime that almost entirely isolated Gunnison from the rest of the world. Gunnison became one of the few communities that largely escaped the ravages of the influenza pandemic, at least in the beginning – in an instructive example of the limited human patience for the social, psychological and economic disruption of quarantine, adherence eventually waned and the front page of the Gunnison News-Champion's March 14, 1919, issue reports that the influenza pandemic got to Gunnison, too. Nevertheless, Gunnison had a very lucky escape – of a population of over 6,900 (including the county), there were only a few cases and a single death.

. . . the two families were about to be impacted in a major way as Philadelphia and the rest of the world were slammed with a pandemic so catastrophic that it killed more people than World War I.

Dr. Fauci had reason to know that this weary bogeyman was a canard. In 2008, he coauthored a study for the Journal of Infectious Disease confessing that virtually all of the “influenza” casualties in 1918 did not actually die from flu but from bacterial pneumonia and bronchial meningitis, which are, today, easily treated with antibiotics unavailable in 1918.52 The Spanish flu that government virologists have invoked to terrorize generations of Americans with vaccine compliance is, after all, a paper tiger.