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World War I was, however faintly, still part of my life when I grew up in the Cold War years. I can remember being hoisted on my father's shoulders to see the aging American veterans of that global conflict during what must have been a Veterans Day parade down New York City's Fifth Avenue. My parents talked about their memories of both world wars, as well as the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression when I was growing up. But there was one thing they had lived through as children that they never mentioned, not once: the devastating great influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 that killed so many more Americans than died in both world wars. I had no idea it had even happened, though it was far more devastating than the present pandemic globally (horrific as Covid-19 is).
And I'm not alone in having that blankness in my past. None of the parents of my friends spoke to them of it either. A horror of our history, it had been deep-sixed in a striking way when, in 2005, John Barry published his groundbreaking book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (which hit the bestseller lists then, and again in 2020). In it, Barry wrote, "Before that worldwide pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history" In a world with a population less than one-third today's" that influenza likely caused at least fifty million deaths worldwide and possibly as many as one hundred million."
Imagine such a horror wiped out of our collective memory! Now, 16 years after that book was published, we again find ourselves mired in a disastrous global pandemic, one that we should never forget, especially given the ongoing pandemic dangers on this planet. With that in mind, journalist Nina Burleigh has bravely written her own striking book, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic, on the unfolding of Covid-19 in America not nearly a century after the disease hit us, but right in the middle of the nightmare itself. And this time, as she says in today's piece, forgetting should be inconceivable. Tom
The Great Forgetting
Why We Forget Epidemics and Why This One Must Be Remembered
The second Moderna shot made me sick as predicted. A 24-hour touch of what an alarmed immune system feels like left me all the more grateful for my good fortune in avoiding the real thing and for being alive at a time when science had devised a 95% effective vaccine in record time.
To distract myself from the fever as I tried to sleep, I visualized strands of synthetic messenger RNA floating into my cells to produce the alien spike protein that attracted my warrior T-cells. I drifted off envisioning an epic micro-battle underway in my blood and had a series of weird nightmares. At about two a.m., I woke up sweating, disoriented, and fixated on a grim image from one of the studies I had consulted while writing my own upcoming book, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic, on the Covid-19 chaos of our moment. In his Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver, Arthur Allen described how, in the days of ignorance not so very long ago doctors prescribed "hot air baths" for the feverish victims of deadly epidemics of smallpox or yellow fever, clamping them under woolen covers in closed rooms with the windows shut.
Mildly claustrophobic in the best of times, my mind then scrabbled to other forms of medical persecution I'd recently learned about. In the American colonies of the early eighteenth century, for example, whether or not to take the Jenner cowpox vaccine was a matter of religious concern. Puritans were taught that they would interfere with God's will if they altered disease outcomes. To expiate that sin, or more likely out of sheer ignorance, medical doctors of the day decreed that the vaccine would only work after weeks of purging, including ingesting mercury, which besides making people drool and have diarrhea, also loosened their teeth. "Inoculation meant three weeks of daily vomiting, purges, sweats, fevers," Allen wrote.
To clear my thoughts, to forget, I opened my window, let in the winter air, and breathed deep. I then leaned out into the clean black sky of the pandemic months, the starlight brighter since the jets stopped flying and we ceased driving, as well as burning so much coal.
Silence. An inkling of what the world might be like without us.
Chilled, I lay back down and wondered: What will the future think of us in this time? Will people recoil in horror as I had just done in recalling, in feverish technicolor, the medically ignorant generations that came before us?
The Glorious Dead
When America reached the half-million-dead mark from Covid-19 at the end of February, reports compared the number to our war dead. The pandemic had by then killed more Americans than had died in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined and it wasn't done with us yet. But the Covid dead had not marched into battle. They had gone off to their jobs as bus drivers and nurses and store clerks, or hugged a grandchild, or been too close to a health-care worker who arrived at a nursing home via the subway.
Every November 11th, on Veterans Day, our world still remembers and celebrates the moment World War I officially ended. But the last great pandemic, the influenza epidemic of 1918-1920 that became known as "the Spanish flu" (though it wasn't faintly Spain's fault, since it probably began in the United States), which infected half a billion people on a far less populated planet, killing an estimated 50 million to 100 million of them including more soldiers than were slaughtered in that monumental war fell into a collective memory hole.
When it was over, our grandparents and great-grandparents turned away and didn't look back. They simply dropped it from memory. Donald Trump's grandfather's death from the Spanish flu in 1919 changed the fortunes of his family forever, yet Trump never spoke of it even while confronting a similar natural disaster. Such a forgetting wasn't just Trumpian aberrance; it was a cultural phenomenon.
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