March 11th is my personal Remembrance Day for the last pandemic, and by extension the Spanish Influenza. Lest we forget.
Aspirin
Full disclosure: My dad believed in aspirin. He thought it was a wonder drug. I can remember him telling me, “They used to tell you to back down the dose when your ears started ringing - you can take a lot of aspirin and it doesn’t hurt you.” His was the voice of experience. He suffered from headaches all his life and he thought aspirin helped.
In 1918 aspirin was indeed a wonder drug. In September 1918 Rupert Blue, the US surgeon general, advised that flu could be controlled “only by intelligent action of the public.” He added: “During the present outbreak in foreign countries, the salts of quinine and aspirin have been most generally used during the acute attack, those of aspirin apparently with much success in the relief of the symptoms.”
The armies and the navies of the world were at war, and they were buying large quantities of aspirin and using it as a symptomatic treatment for just about everything. At that time the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested a dose of 1,000 milligrams every three hours, the equivalent of almost 25 standard 325-milligram aspirin tablets in 24 hours. This is about twice the daily dosage generally considered safe today. It was an age of, ‘No Labels,’ and everybody was on their own when it came to dosage. I don’t think my dad made up the part about your ears ringing as the upper limit.
The relatively rare Reyes Syndrome (cerebral and liver edema) has been on the map for over forty years. Reyes sometimes occurs when children are dosed with aspirin for the flu. What is not so widely publicized, but more common, is one of the primary symptoms of aspirin toxicity is pulmonary edema. Medicine knows all about it. It’s easy to misdiagnose salicylate intoxication/poisoning, because the symptoms mimic pneumonia. The rapid flu deaths of so many young, healthy, soldiers in hospitals during the 1918 flu was mirrored in hospital patients throughout the United States. I am going to guess the most striking commonality of the unusual, warp-speed, flu deaths in those young men was high-dosage aspirin therapeutics. We were probably inducing pulmonary edema in lungs already stressed with a potent respiratory virus. Guessing is allowed in pandemics, especially after the fact. Who knows how many died a speedy and unnecessary death because of aspirin?
Fresh Air and Sunshine
I can understand wanting to believe masks (air filtration) reduce the risk of viral contagion. There was overwhelming evidence coming out of the Spanish Influenza that no one had any idea if masks worked or not. History seems to answer, ‘no benefit.’ Not that there weren’t mandates and lots of disagreements in 1918. Guns were discharged, people were arrested and fined. There was strife and commotion. There was the Anti-mask League. The defiant anti-maskers will always be with you (at least in the US).
Fresh air is the best therapeutic for respiratory viruses. What goes on with clean sheets, hung out to dry in the fresh air and sunshine? It smells good. Why? Nobody has really figured it out. It's complicated. We don’t know why the sheets smell so good. By 1918, doctors had figured out the best medicine they had for fighting the flu was fresh air and sunlight. Like the sheets, ‘what works’ is better understood than how it works. Medicine’s therapeutic regime of healing and reducing contagion with sunshine and fresh air has not been forgotten, but like Talleyrand said, we learned nothing. “Fresh air and sunlight are good, but we need more. They are not the solution. Pull your mask up.”
Most Covid deaths were old people. Most of those old people resided and died in eldercare facilities. Over fifty percent of the deaths were in people over seventy-five. Over twenty-five percent of the dead were over eighty-five. Eighty-five percent of Covid deaths were in people over sixty. We used submarine therapy to mitigate Covid deaths at nursing homes. Isolate. Isolate the patients from the people, isolate them from the outdoors. Isolate them from each other. We quarantined the healthy, and Covid raged through our eldercare facilities. At least you are allowed to play cribbage on submarines. Unlike submarines where a great deal of effort and knowledge is applied to air filtration, we did next to nothing to improve ventilation in nursing homes. From the little I can gather on the internet, there was no controlling the Covid on subs once it got started. So much for state-of-the-art air filtration. Submarines are like nursing homes in another way too. They stink. I guess it’s the amines they use to scrub out the CO2. They say you get used to it. Where are those fresh, clean, sheets when you need them?
Covid was a rare disease in the tropics. Rare in spades in the impoverished tropics. Anywhere people basically live all the time in fresh air and sunshine, there is no appreciable Covid. I can find no exception to this rule. In India, Covid was exclusively an urban phenomenon. Likewise, influenza in the tropics is poorly understood and not often diagnosed. The deeper one digs into influenza in the tropics, the more you realize little is known about it in those regions.
Fresh air and sunshine seem like the obvious answer to why flu viruses are subdued in the tropics.
Vaccines
Before we talk about the mRNA vaccines, I want to talk about the regular flu vaccine. Probably around sixty percent of all Americans are getting the flu vaccine each year. You would think that would be an easy statistic to nail down with some precision, but it’s not. We have been messing around with flu vaccines for around one hundred years. Their effectiveness is not disputed. They reduce contagion and severity in clinical trials. There have been many clinical trials. In the United States the widespread use of flu vaccines began in the late seventies with the Swine flu panic. Vaccination rates have climbed from near zero back then to the estimated sixty percent now. And adjusted flu deaths? No change. Again, it’s not a simple math problem. Flu deaths vary year over year. Depending on the severity of the outbreak, annual flu deaths go up and down. But they also average. And on average there is no statistical reduction in flu deaths from 1980 to 2020. As good as those flu vaccine clinical trials probably are, one suspects they are missing something. I don’t think I am going out on a limb to assert there is, “No meaningful benefit from the flu vaccine.” If the flu vaccine doesn’t reduce flu deaths, how can we conjure a benefit? Sixty years and sixty percent of the population is a big, long-term, sample. Call it the ultimate clinical trial. Flu vaccination rates are down significantly since 2021. People are doubtful about the flu vaccine’s benefit. Their doubt arises because of the Covid vaccine fiasco.
From the Covid beginning, I knew the race was on for a vaccine, and I guessed it would not be very effective. I did expect it to be pretty harmless and did not expect the side effects to be consequential. Why would medical science buy-in on a completely novel genetic vaccine? Medical science would know it would take years to understand it. You need years and years of clinical trials, or so I thought. Nope, all you have to do is believe. Giving billions of people a barely tested, completely novel, genetic vaccine is not a good experiment. Power, loves power. The only explanation is the people wanted a vaccine to save them from the pandemic. Big Pharma delivered. The ‘can do’ American spirit: Warp-speed even. The ‘power to save you’ has a high price tag. The currency is trust. As our Minister at church said, ‘God has nothing to do with this virus.’ We put our trust in medical science. How’d that work out?
Quarantine
Yes, history shows strong action, a quarantine, can slow the spread. A cordon sanitaire works, sort of. Nail the doors shut with the sick inside. Use troops to shoot the errant transgressors, be safe, imprison all who are sick. China proved Covid lockdowns can work, sort of. The Chinese government flattened the curve for three years. It was not until millions of Chinese all around the country started protesting at the same time holding up blank, white, sheets of A4 copy paper that the government got scared and threw in the towel, and gave up “controlling” Covid. The blank paper represented the voiceless. Turns out even the Chinese government has ears to hear.
Globally, we forsook fresh air and sunshine. We kept the elderly isolated together, and in doing so we made the pandemic longer and more deadly. The Chinese merely showed how incredibly stupid it is to empower government to ‘manage’ a pandemic. What a booby prize they won for themselves.
Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s State Epidemiologist during the pandemic, said in November 2023, “We really need to improve the quality of care in our elderly homes, in preparedness for these kinds of issues." Sweden stood out for its light touch and lack of mandates. Sweden passed on the madness and paid no penalty. Tegnell understood his limitations and the Swedes remain grateful for his sane leadership during the crisis. My state, Nebraska, had no mandates, same happy results as Sweden. Tegnell is right, we know what we need to do - now we know. We have to rethink eldercare. We failed the elderly.
Guessing is allowed in history. Guessing has no place in epidemiology. In history, you never know, so you have to guess (believe). In science, all you can know is the experiment is repeatable and it yields the same repeatable results, or it doesn't.
Where we are today is: We build a computer model to calculate the future, put lipstick on our prophetic pig, and call the model ‘science.’ And that science is settled. The future is now modeled and not to be disputed. Only the deniers and the anti-science guys, the flat-earthers, only they dispute scientific modeling. Belief has nothing to do with it, as long as you believe in the models. Models are statistical models, and, “if your experiment needs statistics, you ought to do a better experiment.” Ernest Rutherford, father of nuclear physics
We modeled our lockdowns, our masks, our vaccines and now we want to avert our eyes from the truth. The models are always wrong, and we are left to guess whether or not the models have skill enough to be useful. We can't know. It's like buying stocks, you never know. Afterwards, then you know what happened. This is what we ought to be doing with gusto, studying our mistakes. Try to learn from our mistakes. It's farcical to try and forget your mistakes.
The Afternoon of The Great Run
I use March 11th to mark the beginning of the pandemic. This link offers some supporting evidence for my dating. 11 March was a Wednesday in 2020. They started talking about, ‘flattening the curve’ and staying home. I assumed from the beginning they were talking about someone else staying home. It never occurred to me that I was not an essential worker. The thought crossed my mind that the whole pandemic hysteria was turning a molehill into a mountain. I was never afraid. But it was a mental work in progress. There were lots of unknowns in the beginning. Who can love to walk in the dark? Most of all, it was so interesting.
A few weeks later, I remembered The Day the Dam Broke by James Thurber. Thurber’s humorous, short essay is about the afternoon panic on 12 March 1913 on the east side of Columbus, Ohio. An untrue rumor the water-storage dam had broken had everyone running away, all at once - running for their lives. It is funny a story, but Thurber assures us, it took a long time for it to become a laughing matter.
Around the first of June, 2020, I printed out a few copies of, The Day the Dam Broke, and passed them around. Like Nietzsche’s madman, it was obvious; I had come too early, my time was not yet. The pandemic was not yet funny. Perhaps for some, it never will be. The authorities surely blew a lot of smoke for the hoi poli to inhale. There were a lot of ‘noble lies’ told us for our own good. Nothing could be more obvious from this historical vantage point, we were played like suckers in a bunco racket. Politics never lets a crisis go to waste. Fear is fertilizer for political ambitions.
I used to cheat on my daily math assignments in sixth grade. It was fast and easy. I had more time for play, or something. Maybe I liked the thrill of getting away with it. My friend let me copy his answers. I failed all the tests and I eventually got caught. I got in trouble. I got an “F” too. Sell cheap and tell the truth, that’s how I succeed in business, and I learned the hard way. Cheaters and liars may prosper, but they smell bad to all and sundry. Some people get used to the smell, not me.
Learning nothing from the pandemic is farcical, a comédie f noire. My purpose here is not to incite anger. It’s to facilitate understanding. Let’s not forget how badly we mismanaged the public trust. You’ve got to tell people the truth, even if the truth is intolerable to the people when they hear it. ‘We don’t know’ is a terrible answer in a political context. It is so often the only honest answer we have. “I don't know,” both the leaders and the followers need to practice saying those words. It’s not a responsive reading. The people are not supposed to respond, “then now is the time to panic.” The next crisis is just around the corner. Trust in God. Hold all others to the gold standard. Verify they are telling the truth.
Yes, indeed. The pity is the loss of trust in so many institutions and so many are suspected by guilt of association. Trust nobody is a popular zeitgeist be it ever so hypocritical.
Bloody good mate!