Lessons to learn from The Great Influenza
The information of the Great Influenza or Spanish flu is remarkably explained by John M. Barry, a historian, in his book “The Great Influenza”.
The Great Influenza is a captivating story about the deadliest epidemic known to mankind. John Barry critically writes about the origins of Influenza and helps to infer parallels between what happened a century ago and the challenges we are facing due to the Covid-19.
In mid-September of 1918, a brilliant young scientist, Paul Lewis, was called upon by the Navy to solve a mystery that dumbfounded the clinicians. People were falling ill in such ferocity that there were no beds to treat them. It was an influenza outbreak that was about to cause a massacre. The spread was so fast that before any authorities took steps to enforce strict quarantine measures, the virus had already infected one-third of the population. The relentless deaths made it hard to find enough coffins to bury the deceased.
The influenza virus was particularly adept in moving from species not only because it mutated rapidly, but also had a “segmented” genome. This meant that its genes did not lie along a continuous strand of its nucleic acid, as do genes in most organisms. But it occurred in unconnected strands of RNA, which could lead to reassortment of their genes. In layman terms, It is like shuffling two decks of cards together to create an entirely new hybrid virus.
He not only tells the story of this deadly pandemic, but he also gives a lot of light on the years preceding it. Captivatingly, he explores the development of medical science in the United States. Institutions like John Hopkins University, Rockefeller Institute in New York, and Harvard University played a significant role in setting stringent scientific standards and encouraged research which turned out to be influential in transforming medicine.
The contributions of the scientific community are a riveting story of science, of discovery, of how one thinks, and of how one changes the way one thinks and leads with determined action.
Some of the scientist which made an extraordinary contribution are:
1. William Henry Welch: His role as a catalyst in the creation of an entire generation of scientists who would transform American medicine, scientists who would confront influenza in 1918 and whose findings from that epidemic still echoes today. Undoubtedly, Welch was the most knowledgeable man.
2. Oswald Avery: Avery was driving and obsessive. Part artist and part hunter, he had a vision. His experiments were exquisite, elegant, and irrefutable.
3. Paul Lewis: As a young investigator in 1908 he proved polio was caused by a virus and devised a vaccine that was 100 percent effective in protecting monkeys. It would be half a century before a polio vaccine could protect man. He too was one of the prime investigators searching for the cause and cure of influenza. Ultimately his ambition to investigate disease would cost him his life.
4. William Park: William Park made New York City’s municipal laboratories a premier research institution. When teamed with the more creative temperament of Anna Williams, his rigorous scientific discipline led to dramatic advances, including the development of a diphtheria antitoxin still in use.
5. Anna Wessel Williams was probably the leading female bacteriologist in the world. A lonely woman who never married, she told herself she would “rather [have] discontent than happiness through lack of knowledge,”
One of the most striking examples of repeated themes is the conspiracy theorists and disease deniers of 1918 that in the long view of history are fully exposed as indefensible lunatics. Another example is the officials who were sluggish to follow the advice of scientists only to be forced to live with the blood that was on their hands.
Concluding thoughts
The book has become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon in and of itself. Not only has a current director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci repeatedly recommended it to understand the current pandemic, but George Bush’s reading of the book in the early 2000s was one of the key reasons that the US had constructed any substantial infrastructure to respond to a pandemic at all. Furthermore, the book highlights the uncomfortable reality that the COVID-19 pandemic is not the worst-case scenario. There are lessons that we have still not learned between 1919 and 2020 that must be learned before the next inevitable pandemic.
