Epidemics, Then and Now
"The Spanish flu," killing 10 times as many souls, ended with herd immunity
In October 1918, the “Spanish flu” felled James Cagney Sr., forcing his nineteen-year-old namesake to quit Columbia University and go to work full-time to help put bread on the table and a roof over the heads of his mother and four siblings, about which I write in “Oasis” II.
But for this tragedy, Yankee Doodle Dandy might never have come to be.
The month Cagney Sr. died was the deadliest, killing some 195,000 Americans, including 15,000 New Yorkers. Beginning in the spring of 1918 as a mild “three-day flu,” it came back with a vengeance in the fall of 1918 and stumped the medical establishment, killing countless souls almost immediately or within days, the lungs filling with fluid, suffocating the victim.
The Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918, history’s most lethal, cut short the lives of some 50 million, 2.5 times World War I’s fatalities. By spring 1920, herd immunity finally kicked in, mercifully bringing the crisis to a close.
One hundred years later, COVID-19 and its variants — a.k.a. the “Chinese flu”1 — like the “Spanish flu,”2 hit with a vengeance and soon broadened to a “pandemic,” which continues to this day as herd immunity has been displaced by the misguided goal of universal vaccination, which has only prolonged the crisis.
The CDC is now forecasting over 60,000 deaths this winter according to their early surveillance system for flu outbreaks, gleaned from Emergency Rooms and hospital registration systems nationwide. By Christmas they are forecasting 15,000 deaths per week. As the Daily Mail reported today, “CDC issues grim forecast warning that weekly COVID cases will jump by 55% to 1.3 MILLION by Christmas Day and that deaths will surge by 73% to 15,600 a week as Omicron becomes dominant strain.”
Yet the idea that Omicron, and its impact on the unvaccinated, is the culprit, causing the spike in deaths, is not accurate. Cagney’s beloved Columbia University just released a study that shows that Omicron is ‘markedly resistant’ to the vaccines and booster shots.
The other piece of the puzzle is that, more and more, the medical establishment is finding, as revealed in a recent Swedish study, that the vaccine itself is causing illness because it is disarming the immune system, making less dangerous viruses like Omicron a huge threat, when a healthy immune system would easily fend them off.
As reported in “And, Now Queen Elizabeth…,” the Swedish lab study released in mid-October, titled “SARS–CoV–2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro,” found that the spike protein associated with COVID and the experimental “vaccines” blocks enzyme production essential for repairing damaged DNA, in turn blocking “proliferation” of B and T cells key to fighting infection.
What this means is that the likely suspect in the increased incidence of illness and chronic diseases for those who have received the COVID jab, is precisely this “disarming” of the immune system.
But the good news is, Omicron will confer natural immunity, as Dr. Robert Malone reported last week on War Room: Pandemic, making the reality of herd immunity that much nearer, the ‘natural immunity deniers’ notwithstanding. (For more information, see Dr. Malone’s article, “Omicron Today.”)
Postscript: On this the 100th anniversary of the death of my great grandfather Callahan Frank Keane, who emigrated from County Clare in 1897 and served as a banker, walking to such clients as President Woodrow Wilson, I have to wonder what he would make of the irrational response to an epidemic turned pandemic, that has felled but 10% of the souls who died from the Spanish flu. Surely, he would bring to it the wisdom of his time that knew that herd immunity would, in the end, win the day.
*******
UPDATE: On December 19, two days after publication of “Epidemics, Then and Now,” news broke that Anthony Fauci and NIH “sabotaged” the Great Barrington Declaration which upheld the principle of herd immunity.
*******
Mary Claire Kendall is author of Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends , published in Madrid in 2016 under the title También Dios pasa por Hollywood. She recently finished Oasis II, featuring, among other legends, James Cagney. She served as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1989-1993.
It is also called the “China flu” given its origins. It was likely released, either accidentally or otherwise, from The Wuhan Institute of Virology, as Sharri Markson reports, not the local “wet market.”
It was called the “Spanish flu” because Spain was neutral during World War I and was the only country not to censor reports about the flu. As History.com reports, “Unlike in the Allied and Central Powers nations, where wartime censors suppressed news of the flu to avoid affecting morale, the Spanish media was free to report on it in gory detail. News of the sickness first made headlines in Madrid in late-May 1918, and coverage only increased after the Spanish King Alfonso XIII came down with a nasty case a week later.”