On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we travel back in time and look at the Spanish Flu of 1918. This 15 month pandemic was the worst in history. It killed more people than the Black Plague and AIDS. It killed more people than every war in the 20th century combined—in just over a year! Estimates say that a third of the world’s population caught this bug, and it killed upwards of 100 Million people worldwide, all in the back drop of World War One.

The Spanish Flu earned its name not because it started in Spain (it simply affected the King of Spain who was neutral during WWI). In fact, most experts today think it started in a pig farm in Kansas and jumped from pig to bird to human and spread to the nearby Army base and out from there. The Flu was not the typical influenza we think of today. Indeed, within two hours, it would give someone pneumonia. A few hours later, it would make them turn blue due to lack of oxygen. A few hours after that, they’d drown in their own fluids and die. It affected healthy males ages 20-40 the most, which is the opposite of how a typical flu operates.

So, how did the flu get so deadly? Mutation. It’s what happens when it jumps through various species. How did it spread in the perfect storm, globally? First, WWI. Trench warfare, ships full of soldiers locked in with each other, and the stresses of being a soldier exacerbated it. But that wasn’t all. The biggest problem came from President Woodrow Wilson. He created the Committee on Public Information and Sedition Act, which combined to make it a crime with a 20 year sentence to say anything that would undermine the morale and effectiveness of the US during war time.

This made newspapers lie and say the flu was safe. Public health directors, newspaper editors, and even doctors were forced to tell people everything was fine, and their city had a typical flu. Of course these lies led to a radical spread of the Spanish Flu through America and then the rest of the world.

It got so bad that railroads shut down. Families wouldn’t even visit or help each other because they were so afraid of dying just a few hours after symptoms started. Children through the nation starved to death because their parents were dead, and everyone was scared to come help and risk infection. San Francisco created a shoot on sight policy for anyone not wearing a mask in public.

The Spanish Flu was about as bad as a pandemic could get. The final take away from all of our research is that every health official in the world thinks this can and will happen again, and it might even be worse next time. Give this one a listen if you want to sleep uneasily at night!

Smithsonian’s Excellent Article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/