These men start with what appears to be an attack of la grippe or influenza, and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day, and still keeping it up.
Historically, the biggest killer in any war has been disease. In fact, until World War I, disease killed far more soldiers than combat. And even in that war, 45,000 American soldiers died of flu alone. Army camps are one of the most dangerous places for the spread of disease, for obvious reasons. And for just as obvious reasons—protecting individuals and maintaining a capable fighting force—military recruits and soldiers are required to get certain vaccines. This goes back further than you’d think—in 1777 General George Washington required his troops to be inoculated against smallpox.
Soldiers suffering from influenza at the hospital in Camp Funston, Kansas, in 1918.
American military officers are some of the best trained and educated in the world and they are very aware of the dangers that infectious diseases pose to their troops. That is why so many of them reacted in dismay when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth removed the mandate for flu vaccinations. American military leaders know their responsibilities require them to both maintain readiness and look out for the welfare of their troops. This order injured both readiness and personal safety.
It didn’t take long to see the effects. While flu season generally wraps up by early spring, the special conditions of military life make it especially risky. In June, almost 300 soldiers at a single base alone have come down with influenza which has so far led to 4 hospitalizations and possibly one death.
When you allow people’s personal beliefs to trump science, you often encounter the “FAFO” phenomenon. When politicians enact dangerous policies it takes years to see the harm, often in a different election cycle when they can no longer be held to account. In this case, it took months. Will the current leadership pay a price? It doesn’t seem likely.
The flu pandemic of 1918 killed about 675,000 Americans, and estimates put the global death toll at somewhere between 1-3% of the entire human population. War certainly made flu easier to spread. At that point in history, people rarely traveled far from home and far fewer people lived in cities. The war shipped people all over the world. Medical care wasn’t terrible, but wasn’t great by modern standards.
Now, however, global travel is common. We pack ourselves into small aluminum tubes and travel to the remotest parts of the earth. We crowd ourselves into increasingly large mega-cities. In 2009 a global pandemic of influenza H1N1 tore across the globe. This was the same antigenic variant that killed so many in 1918. Thanks in large part to modern science and medicine, the impact was smaller, but still significant.
One of the most dramatic and horrifying aspects of the 1918 pandemic was its tendency to kill off the young and healthy. Usually flu deaths are in the very young and the very old. In 2009, we saw this shift—the number of deaths was that of a typical flu season, but young people died in much higher numbers than usual.
When it comes to public health, small decisions can have big consequences. Whether it’s removing a pump handle to stop a cholera outbreak, or stopping mandatory vaccinations in the highest risk groups, our policy makers can save us our kill us wholesale.
Hopefully, whatever your political leanings, you are a voter. When you go to the polls for the primaries and for general elections, it would be wise to consider which candidates support keeping you and yours alive, and which ones are willing to kill you for their own quirky, anti-science political ideologies.
