Some notes from the Spanish Flu
https://www.history.com/news/1918-pandemic-spanish-flu-censorship
--“Basically, it gets called the ‘Spanish flu’ because the Spanish media did their job,” says
Lora Vogt, curator of education at the
National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. In Great Britain and the United States—which has a long history of blaming
other countries for disease—the outbreak was also known as the
“Spanish grip” or
“Spanish Lady.”--
Historians aren’t actually sure where the 1918 flu strain began, but the
first recorded cases were at a U.S. Army camp in Kansas in March 1918. By the end of 1919, it had infected
up to a third of the world’s population and killed some 50 million people. It was the worst flu pandemic in recorded history, and it was likely exacerbated by a combination of censorship, skepticism and denial among warring nations.
Other newspapers and public officials claimed during the flu’s first wave in the spring and early summer of 1918 that it wasn’t a serious threat. The
Illustrated London News wrote that the 1918 flu was “so mild as to show that the original virus is becoming attenuated by frequent transmission.” Sir Arthur Newsholme, chief medical officer of the British Local Government Board,
suggested it was unpatriotic to be concerned with the flu rather than the war, Arnold says.
In April 1919, the flu even disrupted the
Paris Peace Conference when President Wilson
came down with a debilitating case. As when the British prime minister had contracted the flu back in September, Wilson’s administration hid the news from the public. His personal doctor instead told the press the president had caught a cold from the Paris rain."