This article caught my eye, only because I had been updating and expanding my own family tree in Ancestry and came across many deaths on all sides of my family here in the United States in ’18 (that is 1918).
While it has been reported that over 600,000 US lives (and 50-100 million world wide) were lost to this “flu” in under a year, and the CDC acknowledges that the first reports came out of the military base in Kansas called Fort Riley in September 1918, one would have to wonder, what part of this flu was “Spanish”.
This is where all the questions have to start. Any researcher will read an article, check their biases and cross-reference source material and just consider a thought without believing it first.
So as we “march” (no pun intended for the WWI timing of this event and ground zero being a US Army base) through the facts, the half-truths and the outright myths, just walk along with me and enjoy the journey.
Spain was one of a few countries not involved in World War I. Most of the countries involved in the war censored their press.
Free from censorship concerns, the earliest press reports of people dying from disease in large numbers came from Spain. The warring countries did not want to additionally frighten the troops, so they were content to scapegoat Spain.
You thought that fake news was a recent event? Not true, already in WWI (and prior) the media (press/newspapers) tended to repeat what the government said was happening. The narrative is so strong that 100 years later we still know this to have been the “Spanish Flu”
According to a 2008 National Institute of Health paper, bacterial pneumonia was the killer in a minimum of 92.7% of the 1918-19 autopsies reviewed. It is likely higher than 92.7%.
OK, so it is neither Spanish, nor was it the flu. It was pneumonia!
Pneumococci or streptococci were found in “164 of (the) 167 lung tissue samples” autopsied. That is 98.2%. Bacteria was the killer.
This is NIH data from high quality autopsies performed at that time.
OK, so what “all of a sudden” happened in the days, weeks and months leading up to this event that unfolded from Fort Riley outward throughout the US and into the world? Well, for one, the US Army itself ballooned from 280,000 soldiers in pre-war 1917 to over 6,000,000 during WWI.
I know full well personally what life in boot camp is like as a new recruit. One is totally at the mercy of “the system”, reinforced with peer pressure of 40 per platoon, 80 per company and more in a battalion. One is brought through this process, this mind game, so that the result is total obedience to orders given, swiftly. During boot-camp we were given shots one day only to wake up the next day covered in chicken-pox, all 80 of us. Following this we had blood draws, DAILY, for three straight days, because “the refrigerators for the blood samples kept failing”. This was in the 1970s, just think what it was like in the 1910s! Read about it straight from NIH documents here.
Between January 21st and June 4th of 1918, Dr. Gates reports on an experiment where soldiers were given 3 doses of a bacterial meningitis vaccine. Those conducting the experiment on the soldiers were just spitballing dosages of a vaccine serum made in horses.
OK. This might not figure into the outbreak a few months later. But a good researcher follows the story anyway and develops their conclusions later.
An article from 2008 on the CDC’s website describes how sick WWI soldiers could pass along the bacteria to others by becoming “cloud adults.”
“Finally, for brief periods and to varying degrees, affected hosts became “cloud adults” who increased the aerosolization of colonizing strains of bacteria, particularly pneumococci, hemolytic streptococci, H. influenzae, and S. aureus.
For several days during local epidemics—particularly in crowded settings such as hospital wards, military camps, troop ships, and mines (and trenches)—some persons were immunologically susceptible to, infected with, or recovering from infections with influenza virus.
Persons with active infections were aerosolizing the bacteria that colonized their noses and throats, while others—often, in the same “breathing spaces”—were profoundly susceptible to invasion of and rapid spread through their lungs by their own or others’ colonizing bacteria.”
Taking experimentally vaccinated men and sending millions to Europe into very unsanitary conditions is on the scale of the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” that was accomplished later in clinical studies conducted between 1932 and 1972!
My conclusions have yet to be made. I would like to cross-reference some other sources to see if the data lines up .. but the following is horrendous:
The toll on US troops was enormous and it is well documented. Dr. Carol Byerly describes how the “influenza” traveled like wildfire through the US military. (substitute “bacteria” for Dr. Byerly’s “influenza” or “virus”):
“… Fourteen of the largest training camps had reported influenza outbreaks in March, April, or May, and some of the infected troops carried the virus with them aboard ships to France …
As soldiers in the trenches became sick, the military evacuated them from the front lines and replaced them with healthy men.
This process continuously brought the virus into contact with new hosts—young, healthy soldiers in which it could adapt, reproduce, and become extremely virulent without danger of burning out.
… Before any travel ban could be imposed, a contingent of replacement troops departed Camp Devens (outside of Boston) for Camp Upton, Long Island, the Army’s debarkation point for France, and took influenza with them.
Medical officers at Upton said it arrived “abruptly” on September 13, 1918, with 38 hospital admissions, followed by 86 the next day, and 193 the next.
Hospital admissions peaked on October 4 with 483, and within 40 days, Camp Upton sent 6,131 men to the hospital for influenza. Some developed pneumonia so quickly that physicians diagnosed it simply by observing the patient rather than listening to the lungs…” (7)
The United States was not the only country in possession of the Rockefeller Institute’s experimental bacterial vaccine.
A 1919 report from the Institute states: “Reference should be made that before the United States entered the war (in April 1917) the Institute had resumed the preparation of antimeningococcic serum, in order to meet the requests of England, France, Belgium Italy and other countries.”
More research to follow. I encourage you to do the same.
-SF1