Contagious
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“That men do not learn very much from history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” ~Aldous Huxley
During the Covid years, I did a lot of “down the rabbit hole” of Googling. For example, I learned a lot about Stoicism. That rabbit hole started with reading a Marcus Aurelius quote which led to Meditations which led to readings by Epictetus, Seneca and modern philosophers.
The other rabbit hole I went down was learning about the great influenza pandemic in the early 1900s. I was undone by reading the John Barry book, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. The parallels to the Trump and Wilson administrations’ leadership (or lack there of) were remarkably similar. I became obsessed with trying to figure what was happening in Montana and Missouri where my two sets of grandparents were living as young married couples. It was fascinating to read about the time.
The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic killed more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history. The lowest estimate of the death toll is 21 million, while recent estimates from 50 to 100 million dead. Most deaths occurred in a sixteen week period, from mid-September to mid-December of 1918.
The influenza pandemic or the one history books tend to call the Spanish Flu (although it almost certainly did not begin in Spain) found its most willing partner in the United States Army. Camp Funston was a major World War I training cantonment located at Fort Riley, Kansas, established in July 1917 to train over 50,000 soldiers for the 89th Infantry Division. It was a "pop-up" city with over 1,400 wooden buildings. It is historically significant as the site of the first reported case of the 1918 flu, when an Army cook named Albert Gitchell reported to the infirmary with a fever, sore throat, and headache. By noon that same day, more than a hundred soldiers had walked in with identical symptoms. Within a week, over five hundred were hospitalized. The base surgeon noted it, filed a report, and the Army kept shipping men to Europe. I was rather stunned to read this, since my grandfather was stationed at Fort Riley before going over to France during WWI.
The conditions inside those training camps were, to put it generously, ideal for a respiratory virus. Barracks were packed with men sleeping bunk to bunk, sharing mess halls, latrines, and drill grounds. The Army had been built to move soldiers fast -not to keep them well. By April of 1918, twenty-four of the thirty-six largest Army camps in the country were already reporting outbreaks. When the far more lethal second wave arrived that fall, it followed the troop ships straight across the Atlantic.
Historian Carol Byerly would later write that influenza simply sailed with the soldiers to France. At the port of Brest — the main landing point for American forces — the virus spread from the ships to the installations, and from the installations into the trenches. Somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of all U.S. Army and Navy personnel were infected. More American soldiers died of influenza and its complications than were killed in combat. (Source: The U.S. Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 by Carol R. Byerly.)
The Army did eventually respond, though fitfully and with uneven results. At Camp Upton in New York, the surgeon directed soldiers to stay within their own section of the camp and locked down entire companies the moment a single case appeared. Where those orders were followed, the measures held. Where officers allowed men to mingle freely across the camp, the flu raged.
The military also deployed face masks, issued them to patients, nurses, and hospital staff, and documented their use in photographs that have survived to this day. One of the more compelling voices at the time was Dr. Joseph A. Capps, a physician at Camp Grant in Illinois, who published his findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1918. Capps had required doctors, nurses, and ward staff to wear gauze masks and reported that the results were promising enough that he abandoned controlled testing and simply made masking standard practice. Again I was so surprised to read about that — I actually knew Dr. Joe! Of course, when I knew him he was quite elderly. He was the father of my dad’s partner, so I would see him from time to time.
After the war, Army medical officers conducted broader studies on mask effectiveness and reached a carefully hedged conclusion: masks could work, but only if constructed correctly and worn consistently. A mask hanging around the neck or pulled below the nose, they noted, was no mask at all. It was a lesson about human behavior as much as epidemiology — one that the country would, in its way, keep needing to learn again.
When the Armistice finally came on November 11, it was impossible to maintain quarantines, but by then influenza had passed through most camps, leaving much to celebrate and to mourn. Influenza would again sweep American military camps in the United States and Europe in early 1919, but would be less virulent than the previous wave and find less fuel, as demobilization rapidly depopulated the camps.
While the U.S. military had helped to subdue the Germans, the medical profession had failed to conquer an even more deadly, unseen enemy. Now in peacetime, thousands of physicians left military service to return to civilian life, taking with them their searing experiences of war and disease, victory and defeat. The inability to find a quick cure in 1918 pushed medical science to pivot toward finding the virus, which ultimately led to the development of vaccines in the decades following the pandemic.
Flu vaccines generally reduce the risk of flu illness by 40% to 60% when the vaccine strains are well-matched to the viruses circulating in the community. Even when the match is less than ideal, vaccination significantly lowers the risk of severe outcomes like hospitalization and death. For the 2024–2025 flu season, the CDC classified the season as having high severity, with an estimated 23,000 deaths from influenza reported so far in the United States. The cumulative percentage of deaths due to influenza was 0.7%, which is the highest recorded for a non-pandemic season since 2015-16. (FYI, the 1918 influenza pandemic had an estimated global case fatality rate of 2.5% to 5%. This was exceptionally high compared to standard seasonal flu epidemics.)
Lately, I’ve been reading about how many of the Baltimore Orioles have been benched due to the flu. As of today, a “really bad” case of the flu has been circulating through the Baltimore Orioles clubhouse, leading to multiple player absences. Left-handed starter Trevor Rogers was placed on the 15-day injured list (retroactive to April 27) due to the illness, and utility player Weston Wilson also missed time, highlighting a sickness impacting the team’s depth. Manager Craig Albernaz confirmed the flu is going around the clubhouse. One can speculate that a locker room is probably about as contagious as a barrack and unlike staff members, MLB players are not mandated to receive flu or other vaccinations.
Which brings us to April 2026. Our feckless Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced, effective immediately, that the U.S. military would no longer require service members to receive the annual flu shot — a mandate that had been in place since 1945, instituted in direct response to what influenza had done to American forces in World War I. (Flu vaccine requirement discarded ‘effective immediately,’ Hegseth says)
Hegseth framed the decision as a matter of medical autonomy and religious freedom, saying that the notion of a universal flu vaccine requirement was “just overly broad and not rational.” He made the announcement the same week that U.S. troops were actively deploying to the Middle East, packed into transport ships and staging areas, sleeping in close quarters, sharing air.
The Navy and Marine Corps’ own public health command had warned, in language that could have been lifted from a 1918 Army report, that flu can spread quickly in military environments and that outbreaks “may be widespread and can adversely impact force readiness and mission execution.” The Army once learned that lesson at a cost of more than 45,000 dead.
It seems that former co-host Fox & Friends Weekend, Pete Hegseth, would prefer we learn that lesson again.
Thought for the day in honor of his birthday…
“Alas for our foolish human nature! Its fond mistakes are persistent. The dictates of reason take a long time to assert their own sway.”
— Rabindranath Tagore
Worth reading
Hegseth to the Troops: We Are Bringing Back the Flu!
WAR-FIGHTERS! As a step to making sure we are ready for warfare at all times, we have decided to ELIMINATE THE MANDATORY FLU SHOT! Nothing says “we are ready for war” like “we all have the flu.”
Get your hot-water bottles! Get your ibuprofen! Not Tylenol, though! It knows what it did. Because we are bringing FLU to the war-fighters! Are you ready to have a RUNNY NOSE and an ITCHY THROAT? Are you ready to get REALLY SERIOUSLY DEHYDRATED AND NEED MEDICAL ATTENTION? Hoo-RAH!
Eighth Colorado child dies from influenza amid harsh respiratory season
Another child in Colorado has died from the flu. It’s the eighth this season. The case was in a child under the age of five from the Denver metro area. That’s the most of any year in more than two decades, except the year of the H1N1 pandemic.
“It certainly has been a tough influenza season for all populations, but it does seem like our pediatric population has been especially hard hit,” said Dr. Rachel Herlihy, the state epidemiologist, in an interview. “Every pediatric influenza death is a tragedy, and it’s incredibly unfortunate that we’ve had so many this year.”
She said of the eight, five were unvaccinated. Four of them had no record in a state database showing they were vaccinated, and the other was a child younger than 6 months old, too young to get the flu vaccine.
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As Trump slashes science funding, young researchers flee abroad. Without solid innovation, the US could cease to have the largest biomedical ecosystem in the world.
HHS rejects publication of study showing Covid-19 vaccines prevent hospitalizations, ER visits
Covid-19 vaccines roughly halved the chances that a US adult would need to visit the emergency room or be hospitalized with their infections last fall and winter, according to two sources familiar with the findings of a new study. But you won’t hear about it from the agency that led the research: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The current head of the CDC, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s also director of the US National Institutes of Health, blocked the publication of those findings in the CDC’s flagship journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, according to the sources.