American Press Pushes Ridiculous Comparisons Between Spanish Flu and COVID
In its race for clicks, the press fails to explore many of the critical differences between the Spanish Flu and COVID.
Long-term readers will recall that I have mentioned the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 in several posts, including one close to the centennial anniversary of that devastating episode.
Of course, the American press is quick to push any analogy to the flu epidemic to drive click and panic. Today’s offering is the news that COVID has now officially killed more Americans than the 1918 Influenza.
COVID-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic did — approximately 675,000.
The U.S. population a century ago was just one-third of what it is today, meaning the flu cut a much bigger, more lethal swath through the country. But the COVID-19 crisis is by any measure a colossal tragedy in its own right, especially given the incredible advances in scientific knowledge since then and the failure to take maximum advantage of the vaccines available this time.
“Big pockets of American society — and, worse, their leaders — have thrown this away,” medical historian Dr. Howard Markel of the University of Michigan said of the opportunity to vaccinate everyone eligible by now.
However, the press has left out many analysis details that reveal much starker differences between the Spanish Flu and COVID.
To begin with, the population of the United States as of today is 333,368,397. The US population in 1918 was 1/3rd of that amount, registering 103.2 million. Therefore, comparing apples to apples:
– SPANISH FLU FATALITIES/100K = 665
– COVID FATALITIES/100K = 202
Furthermore, the Spanish Flu heavily targeted young adults. COVID, in contrast, has its most significant impact on the elderly (whose immune system is not as robust as when young). Here is a chart summarizing the age impact between the two diseases.
Furthermore, as a reminder, here is the chart produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing the relative risk of death in each age category compared to young, healthy adults (who were more vulnerable to the Spanish Flu).
The Spanish Flu was deadlier for young adults precisely because it created a cytokine storm, super-activating the immune system.
A cytokine storm is an overproduction of immune cells and their activating compounds (cytokines), which, in a flu infection, is often associated with a surge of activated immune cells into the lungs. The resulting lung inflammation and fluid buildup can lead to respiratory distress and can be contaminated by a secondary bacterial pneumonia—often enhancing the mortality in patients.
This little-understood phenomenon is thought to occur in at least several types of infections and autoimmune conditions, but it appears to be particularly relevant in outbreaks of new flu variants. Cytokine storm is now seen as a likely major cause of mortality in the 1918-20 “Spanish flu”—which killed more than 50 million people worldwide—and the H1N1 “swine flu” and H5N1 “bird flu” of recent years.
In these epidemics, the patients most likely to die were relatively young adults with apparently strong immune reactions to the infection—whereas ordinary seasonal flu epidemics disproportionately affect the very young and the elderly.
In contrast, COVID causes a cascade of symptoms that include inflammation. For the most part, its effects depend on the diet, weight, and preexisting conditions. If the press were genuinely interested in helping during this crisis, it would strongly urge healthy eating, exercise, and outdoor activities.
Finally, during the Spanish Flu era, doctors could not detect the virus nor had effective treatment options. This differs from COVID, which has many new and potentially new options. The press should be providing trustworthy analysis of effective products instead of highlighting only those with politically approved Big Pharma connections. Early treatment is going to keep the COVID fatality rates low.
The American Press: So much smug self-importance. So little understanding and reliable analysis.
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Comments
I looked up the numbers a couple of days ago. Spanish flu 1 in just over 100 people. WuFlu 1 in about 500 people. DIED not much of a comparison.
Yes, but the two may be more comparable than you think.
1) People died of cytokine storms in the Spanish flu, and they die of the same thing in Covid.
2) For Covid, we had lockdowns, people did not go to work or school, and the country was shut down. This reduced the spread and the death toll. quite a bit. For Spanish Flu, we did not do this.
3) We got a vaccine for Covid in 9 months, which drastically reduced the death toll. We never got a vaccine for the Spanish flu.
Overall, it appears we simply dealt more effectively with Covid because of our advanced medical knowledge and capability to get people to take measures to stop it. Covid actually appears to be equally as deadly as the Spanish Flu. It’s just that in 1918, they had no defenses against the disease and little knowledge. So the two are the same.
Since you are a well stream of knowledge on the subject let’s increase that.
1) The age groups are critical to focusing treatment… as noted cytokine storms are not that unique. A big ‘so what”.
2) You must have missed all the pictures of people wearing masks during the Spanish Flu and the lock downs. A very in-depth presentation from Tulane on the Spanish Flu also showed that, in the end, lockdowns didn’t help.
I also reference “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza” BIOSECURITY AND BIOTERRORISM: BIODEFENSE STRATEGY, PRACTICE, AND SCIENCE
Volume 4, Number 4, 2006
3) There were three “waves” of the Spanish Flu…. more like three “drift” mutations and then… nothing. Why? Good question. Different virus may be the reason. With the three close waves there would be no time to cope with the disease even by today’s standards. That it never came back was the key.
From tissue samples retrieved from a grave in permafrost from Northwestern Alaska, the Spanish Flu was most likely avian. This would make it a more potent virus as shown by concern today for avian flus. Why is covid so impressive. The big difference is natural versus engineered. Yes, I said it… gain of function and having attributes contrary to expected mutation of a virus in nature. Since out in the world, variations from drift and shift will occur.
If you watch all of the documentaries on Spanish Flu, you see the same experts as the ones today. This is their “Spanish Flu Moment”… But we are seeing definitions that had stood the test being altered to conform to the shortcomings of this mode of present day containment. The “vaccines” are not the same as the definition of immunity after injection and response. There is no immunity, there is no “herd effect” and since there are animal repositories… this is never going away. It’s a low level “doom’s day’ weapon.
If India is such a failure, then why now a part of their pharmacopeia? HCQ is still in the mix. Many drugs have secondary and desirable effects… minoxidil, viagra, aspirin.
There’s zero evidence that masks and other mitigation efforts had any positive effect. Comparisons of different jurisdictions in which differing levels of mitigation efforts were encouraged or imposed show no indication that mitigation efforts had any effect whatsoever. The “waves” subsided by themselves in places with few or no mitigation efforts, but the subsistence of those same waves was used by those who support mitigation efforts as “proof” that they worked. Once the virus took hold in any population, it did what airborne viruses always do, and there was nothing we did that could have stopped it. The damage done due to the mitigation efforts are being revealed as damaging as COVID, and possibly more so over the long term.
Dying “with” and dying “from” aren’t the same. WuFlu is basically killing old people and sick/obese people. 90% of these people have co-morbid conditions that were far more responsible for their death. The actual WuFlu count should still be well below 100,000, and if compared with the approx 4M who die in the US each year, that 2.5% death rate would probably not even have it in the current top 10 causes of death I haven’t looked at numbers recently because “why bother since they are completely cooked,” but last year the median age of a WuFlu death was actually greater than the median death from all causes. If it were bad, it would be less. But it isn’t because it has little effect on young and healthy people, unlike the Spanish Flu which was an equal opportunity pathogen. I still don’t know a single person who died of WuFlu, so it is hardly a 1 in 100 rate like 1918.
While the number of COVID deaths is likely inflated (audits suggest 20% to 40% inflation), the numbers are well above 100,000. A look at CDC excess death data (which – by the way are estimates) indicated this is about right, and actual COVID deaths are around 450,000. I fully acknowledge the co-morbidities are required for a very large percentage of this number, or just old age, but that does not change the fact these lives ended early (in most cases only month early, not years) because of the complications presented by the virus which exacerbated existing health conditions or made is difficult for the infected to survive their infection.
Your pints effect upon the proportion of the population is well taken, and is your observation that the Spanish Flu affected the young and people in the prime of life, unlike this virus that primarily preys upon the old and the sick.
This is noisy, noisy data. There is so much windage in these numbers that it is Gale Force.
I admit your contention. But to my knowledge, no one has really effectively cast doubt on the CDC excess death estimates. Perhaps because no one has looked.
My point is that the excess death totals seem to agree with the contention the death count is somewhat inflated, but still quite high. The contention was that COVID deaths were well below 100,000. COVID deaths without comorbidities? – I would surely agree with this. The virus, in general, preys upon people who can least resist its effects because of overall frailty or other underlying illness. I am not clear if COVID is a complication to thee comorbidities or if these comorbidities are a complication for COVID.
We should only be reporting symptomatic cases for either hospitalization or death. Doing otherwise casts doubt on the figures.
Also, Covid deaths include variants and 2 1/2 seasons compared to 1 for the Spanish flu. I would also note flu deaths were included with Covid deaths, something the CDC tried to hide.
No, that’s just wrong. So many people have fake information about Covid, and they believe every conspiracy theory they hear.
Can you tell me how many confirmed cases of any strain of influenza occurred each of the last 5 years?
“Experts” were crowing about how the mitigation efforts against COVID eliminated the seasonal flu. So where did those flu deaths go? Or do you believe that the same mitigation efforts that did not stop SARS-CoV-2 somehow stopped the seasonal flu?
That’s the official narrative: masks and social distancing stopped the flu. They fail to explain how such measures could be effective against the flu but ineffective against covid-19. You are just supposed to obey, not question.
In response to both Randian and Dave –
the narrative from both sides is often misleading
There are two primary reason flu infections were down during 2020/2021
First, every year there is a dominant flu strain. During 2020/2021, Covid acted as the dominant flu strain, crowding out the regular flu. That has been the norm forever, though there are seasons when there are two or three dominant strains.
Second , the social distancing did play a role in reducing the spread of both covid and the flu, albeit a small role. In the case of the flu, being the less dominant strain, the social distancing had the appearance of a greater reduction in the spread. Masks on the other hand played a very small role in the reduction in the transmission. In the case of Covid, masks played a very small role. There is some reduction in the spread, just significantly less than promoted by the pro – maskers.
The Spanish flu pandemic spanned three flu seasons. The most severe, by far, was the second wave in 1918. Some people believe the virus actually emerged in the winter of 1917 in the US, so that would have been a smaller 4th wave, but those deaths are not counted in estimated Spanish Flu deaths.
Report this in life years lost if you wish to really drive your point home.
This is truly the biggest difference between these epidemics. On a life years lost, the Spanish flu was much, much worse.
Just more pandemic porn from the propaganda arm of the democrat party. Can be easily and safely ignored by those with intelligence.
Yawn…..The American press? Who still pays attention to them?
Far too many lemmings on the Left, still, unfortunately.
Two things puzzle me.
First, early on in the COVID cycle, I distinctly remember health personnel claiming that they were seeing/treating cases where people died or nearly died due to cytokine storm.
Second, Kyle Lamb’s graph comparing the two flus appears to have bar heights way out of proportion for COVID in the 15-44 age groups. I realize it’s a derivative graph (increase in normally expected deaths for that age group), but it still seems abnormally high.
Yes, you are correct. A Cytokine storm is the main way that Covid kills. It just goes to show never to get your medical information from a wacked out political web site. They are written by 22 year olds that have no idea about what the facts are. They all just want to hype things, and this writer did not even understand how Covid kills. And yet many people think they can get accurate information on Covid from political web sites, when those people know nothing, and have an interest in misleading people so they can drive clicks.
I’ve read about four dozen papers on SARS-CoV-2 and haven’t seen “cytokine storm” mentioned in any of them. COVID kills the elderly, not the young and healthy. One would expect cytokine storms to kill the latter, not the former (as in the Spanish Flu pandemic). COVID may present some effects that appear to be caused by a cytokine storm; the spike protein alone is capable of causing inflammation, therefore mimicking a cytokine storm. (This appears to have misled early researchers, see below.)
I have found an early scientific paper that suggested cytokine storms were responsible for COVID deaths, but that has since been found faulty. (Indeed, the paper presumed COVID was a pulmonary ailment, when it is, in fact, a circulatory disease.)
The paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7527296/
Article based on more advanced understanding:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/08/health/covid-cytokine-storm.html
Note the paper preceded the article by a month, and would have been based on research done even earlier.
In general, I don’t think you can trust any of the numbers associated w/ this pandemic. I would speculate that far more people were infected (w/o symptoms) than were reported. The number of deaths has most likely been inflated (those who died of something totally unrelated, but tested positive). It would be interesting to get actual unbiased data…
The Spanish Flu was about deaths. The WuFlu has redefined the danger as being about infections despite the inflated yet still ridiculously low death rate.
The trouble is that it takes about a year to get any good, clean data. In the meantime, the compile data as good as they can get. There are people that argue the number of deaths is drastically under reporter as well. There are good arguments for over counting and under counting, and we will not know for sure until about a year passes. But the conspiracy theories that they are inflating numbers just for the hell of it are wrong.
There is money for NOT having clean data. The over-reporting of cases to receive for government money has mudded the waters. As for “clean”..when the government states that theirs is the ONLY factual data to be believed and the history of their findings is all over the place… it’s not clean. There is “science” and then “political science”.
I had H1N1 (same virus as Spanish flu) in 2009, I was 41 and in perfect health, it put me in the hospital 3 times over a 3 month period, twice by ambulance. It was the worse illness I have ever had. And yes I have had COVID, cv19 was little more than a sore throat for a couple of days.
As starride notes- the spanish flu is still here, it was never eridicated, not that it could have been eradicated. Same with covid, it will never be eradicated, in spite of all the efforts to eradicate.
There are lots of important lessons to learn from the spanish flu. First and foremost, the only way to beat the virus is for the human population to develop immunity through out the human population. Yes Covid is a nasty virus for some segments of the population, its only really nasty for small segments. Attempts to suppress the development human immune system will only make the problem worse in the long haul .
To paraphrase a WW2 analogy,
do you want to take the Neville chamberlian approach or the George Patton approach. The Neville Chamberlian approach only had a very short term benefit.
So are you willing to let another 1.2 million people die, including your family members, to prove out your theory that it will be better in the long run for the human immune system? That is the question. You may be right that by artificially defeating diseases, we cause problems in the long run. But there are benefits and problems with every course of action, and letting 1.2 million people die when they need not do so is going to be controversial to say the least. But you have a point.
A few points in response
1) Deaths from all flu’s skew heavily to the elderly, though covid skews much more heavily to the elderly than most flu’s. So at this point a significant portion of that sector is either already gone or vaccinated. The spanish flu on the other hand killed a high percentage of otherwise healthy individuals.
2) neville Chamberlian’s approach did save lives in the very short term, but cost vastly more lives in the long term.
3) its extremely unlikely that the # of deaths will triple at this point in the epedimic. Most likely the most reasonable estimate is 30%-50% more, but not 200% more.
A big lingering question that has some real concern is that the “vaccines” are not only counterproductive, but potentially damaging to long term immune response in those “vaccinated”. Since this pandemic is not being handled by true scientific method, all bets are off as things are made up as we go along.
So far my personal count:
Immediate hospitalizations after vaccine: 3 (two long term, probably permanent)
Health that seriously deteriorated after vaccine: 2
Vaccinated people hospitalized, diagnosed covid: 7
Unvaccinated people hospitalized, diagnosed covid: 2
Deaths of vaccinated, diagnosed covid: 1 (super duper other health problems)
Deaths of unvaccinated, diagnosed covid: 0
Maybe my experience is far out of the usual experience, but it doesn’t paint a glowing picture of the safety and effectiveness of the covid vaccine.
Add mine:
Four dead of covid after vaccinated
One badly stroked and bilateral adrenal hemorrhage after vaccination
so 4 dead and one living dead.
“but potentially damaging to long term immune response in those vaccinated”
That, I think, is why Pfizer and the FDA are so hard up to vaccinate everybody. That eliminates any control group that could reveal significant health outcome differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. It’s also being reported that adverse events are being severely underreported, through neglect and semi-official policy.
“So are you willing to let another 1.2 million people die, including your family members, to prove out your theory that it will be better in the long run for the human immune system?”
No. The point is to engage in effective public health measures. Mask wearing and lockdowns are not effective public health measures. Because COVID primarily affects the elderly and those with certain comorbidities, protective health measures should concentrate on this segment of the population, to include vaccination and enhanced precautions such as frequent testing for elevated temperature and isolation of infected persons. For example, creating infectious disease hospitals to segregate patients with infectious disease from patients with other maladies would help. In addition, ventilation with fresh air is likely one of the best things that can be done to limit possible exposure. Encouraging people to go out doors and be outdoors, and to open their doors and windows would also be a great help. Modern HAVAC and building design hinders this, however.
Also, investment in early treatment regimens should be a high priority vice the almost singular reliance upon an unproven “vaccine” and its underlying technology which is a very high risk strategy.
In addition, a little coherence, common sense, and respect for the the freedom and choices of those who disagree would be nice, that is, advocacy vice tyranny in the approach to public health from the government, big tech, the media, etc.
Also, the WuFlu statistics are so padded and corrupted that accurate comparisons are impossible. And then there is the bioweaponization of the WuFlu,…. Here’s the latest on that:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/wuhan-scientists-planned-release-chimeric-covid-spike-proteins-bat-populations-using-skin
Why do we continue to call anything related to Fauci/Daszak “health” research? Shouldn’t the NIH be renamed the Fauci Center for Human Extermination Research? The Nazis look like humanitarians in comparison.
So; you believe that literally millions of people are in on a plot to fake statistics so they can have more people die. And all these people were on the grassy knoll?
I’ll note that you didn’t actually reply to the article. You might want to read the version at The Telegraph if you don’t consider Zero Hedge reliable.
https://archive.fo/IFsEK
Also, this story is not an isolated incident (but maybe you haven’t been paying attention):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obdI7tgKLtA
I do not think he said that at all. The gain of function experiments conducted a Wuhan (not a conspiracy – documented via research publication and grant funding documents) and encouraged by Dr. F (who advocated it to such an extent he likely broke federal prohibitions on this research) were so crazy they even tried, and reportedly succeeded, to create a aerosolized dissemination capability for deadly chimera viruses. How this is not classifiable as a prohibited activity under the Biological Weapons Convention is a mystery to me. And now, it is reported some company in California has created genetically modified corn that make human males sterile. WHY? Because some nut can do it and so does.
There are a lot of people who have a lot to answer. Political embarrassment and partisan politics, however, interferes.
COVID will be officially eradicated day after DJT dies.
Even during the 1980’s, a time of fairly intense HIV/AIDS hysteria, you never saw the level of histrionics and irrationality from the media and the government that are both now propagating with respect to the Wuhan virus bioweapon. And, back then, contracting HIV was basically a death sentence, unlike the Wuhan virus’s 99%-plus survival rate.
We saw an endless stream of lying from the media during AIDS – remember them trying to tell people that AiDS was infecting heterosexuals? The myth of heteosexual AIDs was put forth because the media knew they would have to lie and pretend that anyone could get it.
;Today, the media sees dollar signs in Covid. People were simply not watching TV anymore, and CBS, NBC, ABC see this as a big money maker, since people were watching them again. AND they and their Democratic party masters saw it as a way to get rid of Trump, so they went totally nuts and lied all the time.
AIDS became a politically protected disease and not handled as a lethal communicable disease. More died because of that. Now…. I bet you weren’t in medicine back then so you may not have remembered the bizarre dictates issued such as in the VA system. I actually saw a AIDS case before its eventual elucidation… only in retrospect did it come into focus. 30 y.o. white male, in Seattle, with Kaposi’s sarcoma and no history of immune compromise, and not the classic “aged African male” described in Harrison’s.
The first documented case (in the US anyway) was a gay male flight attendant working for Air Canada.
That appears to having been dispelled but the main route may have been out of Africa via (gay or bisexual) aid workers to Europe and Haiti.
Very telling that no one ever called for gay bars to be shut down, or for mandatory testing. You’d expect a 100% fatal virus to cause a bit more concern than COVID-19, right?
“Very telling that no one ever called for gay bars to be shut down, or for mandatory testing.”
There were such calls, but they were rejected, rightly. The best control method was public education to change the sexual practices of homosexuals, and limiting their ability to contribute to the blood supply until effective screening could be developed.
Dr Markel pretends that we could be done with Covid if only everyone had gotten vaccinated.
Liar. The vaccine resistant strains evolve within the bodies of the vaccinated. The more people are vaccinated the faster resistance develops.
In contrast to the leaky narrow-spectrum immunity created by the mRNA vaccines, natural immunity is broad spectrum and does not leak.
These vaccines are self-defeating. The more they are used the quicker they become ineffective, and reliance on them has likely put herd immunity out of reach.
If we had focussed on therapeutics instead we would be at herd immunity now and probably with many fewer deaths.
Look at Uttar Pradesh. After broadly deploying Ivermectin they got through a huge spike of FauciCCP19 with a much lower fatality rate than us and they are now at REAL, herd immunity, based on broad-spectrum non-leaky natural immunity
This is partially true and partially not true. India has not been the Ivermectin success story that the internet says – again, the internet is spreading lots of false and misleading information, most of which is taking bits and pieces of legit information and then spinning it to push a false narrative. Ivermectin may have some role to play, but have you noticed that no one pushes Hydroxychloroquin any more? That’s because while initial reports said it works, after a while they discovered it could cause lots of problems (heart problems) as well. So the internet now ignores Hydroxy and has gone on to Ivermectin as the secret miracle cure that the evil geniuses are hiding from you. Additional studies may show significant downsides to Ivermectin as well. Don’t just go with whatever BS you hear on talk radio (guys paid to make you listen, so they lie) or on the internet. It takes time to study these things to make sure that drugs really work and do not cause harm. I had a guy tell me that “there are 30 studies that show Ivermectin works” But I showed him that most of those studies were NOT IN HUMANS. Some were just in test tubes and all it showed was that in a test tube, Ivermectin had an antiviral action against some strains of viruses. Others were only done in kidney cells of mice, but at 35 the dose that humans could stand. There is so much misinformation out there, but people are listening to political websites and thinking they are getting good information. A person has to be mental to take their medical information from a political web site dedicated to getting you wound up.
If ivermectin doesn’t have a serious impact on covid at normal human doses than there sure are a hell of of a lot of odd coincidences goin on.
When does “anecdotal” no longer stay “anecdotal”? When there is no more value in suppressing it.
I would much rather have good data. There seems to be a shortage of data that isn’t fairly blatantly manipulated. When anecdotes are all I have, I have to run with the anecdotes. At this point it really is a “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” situation.
“That’s because while initial reports said it works, after a while they discovered it could cause lots of problems (heart problems) as well.”
It does not cause heart problems. A great many people take it daily for years. Sone people think, anecdotally, that after a while it makes you surely, and you need to get off it for a while to calm down. However, those same people normally have jobs that should make them hostile and nasty, so I think it’s the job, and not the drug.
I lived and worked in places I had to take it every day for very long periods of time, and I have known lots and lots of people who have done the same. It does not cause heart problems and would challenge any recent literature to the contrary.
One of the most used and safest drugs …. billions of doses. It’s “super quinine” without the gin!
HCQ “causes lots of problems” because the studies of it intended from the outset to show HCQ is dangerous and ineffective. To wit, these “studies” used grossly excessive dosages of HCQ, far out of line with standard practice, with the predictable result that HCQ looked dangerous. They also omitted co-administration of zinc and vitamin-d, or did so at deliberately useless levels, which everybody advocating HCQ treatment said was essential.
HCQ is used OTC throughout the world without the nasty side effects these studies claimed is SOP with HCQ administration.
Last time I reviewed the publications, there was good evidence on balance that HQC was effective if administered early. Not miraculous, but it was effective. It certainly is not dangerous.
Indeed. They deliberately gave it too late in the game to be effective, then claimed it was ineffective. Like “debunking” CPR by testing it on the embalmed.
Both HCQ and Ivermectin have been used successfully and safely in humans all over the planet for decades; to now claim “problems” with these drugs is to ignore many years of real-world data.
Only the extremely naïve or those with something to gain or protect will continue to cite the extremely flawed and politically driven “studies” that claim otherwise.
Sorry, I thought this was about Spanish Fly. Whoops…
We have a copy of my grandfathers UWisc yearbook from 1919. It includes death notices from prior years as well, so it has lots of young men killed in WWI. But, half the death notices seem to be from the flu. Young, healthy people were being mowed down by the flu.
The obvious question is why is NPR calling it the Spanish Flu? Can we now call COVID-19 the Chinese Wuhan Flu?
If you want the actual answer, it’s because that was before the WHO policy changed in 2015. Disease discovered before 2015 were named for the location most associated with them.
And yes, like all PC and woke policies, it’s stupid, but it’s unlikely to have been designed specifically to protect the Chinese from the blame for this particular virus — not unless the Chinese already knew six years ago that it was likely to get out and infect the world.
If that were true, there wouldn’t be massive blowback every time I refer to it colloquially by it’s country of origin. The media calling everyone “racist” is not quite the same as “please refer to the disease according to WHO policy so that there is no ambiguity”.
Died “with” covid vs died “of” Spanish flu. That’s the key diff. Plus, only about 6% of covid victims went already quite ill with comorbidities, aot almost 100% of Spanish flu victims. Plus, per even Fauci himself, more people died from masking up and catching a bacterial infection than from the Spanish flu virus.
As an aside, the flus of 1890 or so might well have been predecessors of Spanish flu, thereby conferring immunity (in effect, immunizing) on those who would then become the older generation by the time of the Spanish flu. It’s still debated to this day.
Interesting. So —
WHERE IS GOP .CHAIR RONA ROMNEY?
Great book on this subject. I think it is where Gates got his vision to infect the world. Dead people were on people’s porches. Covid in nothing like the 1918 flu. Not even close.
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
“Barry will teach you almost everything you need to know about one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history.”—Bill Gates
The strongest weapon against pandemic is the truth. Read why in the definitive account of the 1918 Flu Epidemic.
Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Barry concludes, “The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that…those in authority must retain the public’s trust.
John Barry ’69 (MA) says that the virulence of the 1918 flu made it a very different disease than COVID-19, but the lessons of that pandemic still resonate.
“Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.”
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/historian-john-barry-compares-covid-19-to-1918-flu-pandemic-454732/
Just to add to your points
Thanks, the book is a long read but loaded with information. It also points out that it took years to develop a vaccine. Additionally some of the challenges that virologist had to deal with and actually put their lives at risk. Some lost their lives to the exposure they received from their research.
When I graduated HS in 1976, I was EXCITED about studying communications and journalism. But my first year in “j-school”, more professors sat around and complained about Nixon, the Viet Nam war, and the republicans than who communicated the importance of ‘who, what, where, when, and how’…
I left the journalism program, switched to a machine shop technology associates program, moved to Texas, and regained my sanity.
I see nothing has changed in the mass media. It is still fullofshit.
As of yesterday, according to CDC data, 464 birthing and non-birthing persons 17 years of age and younger died WITH—not necessarily as a result of—the Fauci Flu™; given the more than 4 million that have contracted it in that age bracket/strata, ergo, 0.002% of kids are at risk.
More simply, 99.998% of menstruating and non-menstruating folks will be perfectly fine were they to contract it….so shove that hold-harmless crap in your syringe and shove it (in someone else’s kid’s arm).
One of my favorite metrics in this sort of case is the number of children who die every year from drowning in buckets of water. That’s got to be extremely rare, and it isn’t something anyone spends much time worrying about, and yet if I recall correctly it’s a bit over 50 a year. So anything with a mortality rate that small isn’t something worth worrying about.
Such as children who accidentally shoot themselves or each other with guns they find. It happens, but extremely rarely.
Nice…might have to dig through DOJ data and see if they disaggregate those ‘hammer deaths’ each year by age group. 🙂
More children accidentally kill themselves with the bicycles we happily strive to provide them, than with guns..
“Report is more than 100 people a year nationwide choke to death on ball point pens.”
–Trivia columnist L.M. Boyd, SF Chronicle, January 8, 1995
How about the misnomer comparison? “Covid-19” might be acceptable and accurate but isn’t at all how we usually name these viruses. “Wuhan Flu” would be more usual, and accurate. the Spanish flu didn’t originate in Spain. During the Great War newspapers in London, Paris, and Berlin were prohibited from publishing any information about the flu, less the enemies learn something.
President Wilson was indifferent to the deaths in the military and did nothing to mitigate the flu and the death toll involved.
It is now, at least if by “we” you mean the WHO. And that (stupid) policy was adopted in 2015, long before this disease came along. So it wasn’t made with this disease specifically in mind.
However, since I don’t accept the WHO’s authority to dictate how we use the English language, I will continue to call it Whuan Disease. (Not “flu”, because it isn’t a form of influenza, despite the similarity of its symptoms.)
The Leftist Enemy Media is nothing but the Propaganda Arm (Ministry of Truth, if you will) of the Leftist DemoKKKRAT (Communist) Party. I call the Chinese Virus what it is; a product of the Wuhan Virology Labs designed as a Bioweapon for the Chinese People’s Army.
There is no substantial comparison between the Chinese Virus and the “Spanish Flu’. The “Spanish Flu” killed predominantly young people, many of which initially were draftees for WWI. Most died from Tubercular like symptoms; suffocation with fluid filled lungs. The Chinese Flu killed, and kills, primarily people with existing comorbidities, are aged and weak, or have compromised immune systems.