What is going on in the world? Fireside chat with Nick Hudson

Join Dan Astin-Gregory on the Pandemic Podcast with his guest Nick Hudson, the founder of Panda, for a fireside discussion about what's going on in the world!

Fear had been diluted by experience

Image: California 1918

 

Fear had been the chief enforcer of the Board of Health’s policies in the fall; now there wasn’t so much fear, and fear had been diluted by experience. Were the Board of Health’s policies really worth the effort to implement them? On December 20 a letter appeared in the Chronicle telling of a man who had himself and his whole family innoculated with Leary’s vaccine, and who wore a mask faithfully, and yet had come down with the flu and was at the moment in the hospital with pneumonia. The letter was signed, “What’s the use?”

Ninety percent of San Franciscans ignored Mayor Rolf’s call for the voluntary readoption of masks. The general run of people claimed no special qualification for passing judgement on recondite medical controversies, but knew from experience that masks were inconvenient and unpleasant… Specific opponents of masking included, as one might expect, Christian Scientists. They had complied, albeit reluctantly, with the fall masking ordinance, but now opposed any revival of that regulation as “subversive of personal liberty and constitutional rights.” Civil libertarians, whose sensitivity on the subject of tyranny exceeded their fear of flu, agreed: “If the Board of Health can force people to wear masks, then it can force them to submit to inoculation, or any experiment or indignity.”

Attacks by medical professionals were most damaging to the pro-masking forces… Dr. F. L. Kelly of the University of California’s bacteriological laboratory issued the bleak declaration that “we don’t know any more about the disease than we did a hundred years ago. There is no known cure or preventative.”

Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic (pp. 108-109)

Dr. White's vaccine helps to calm nerves

Image: Police in Seattle (1918)

“In fact, the influenza situation never looked better. The medical profession now had a flu vaccine to offer, and with it the hope that influenza would soon be as much under control as smallpox… It was distributed free to hundreds of doctors, who began to innoculate thousands of Philadelphians immediately. Newspapers reported that the theory underlying this vaccine was the same as that of a vaccine used in a recent epidemic of polio in the city.

There was to be no effective vaccine against polio for another generation, and a really effective vaccine against influenza is still to be produced, but Doctor White’s vaccine served another purpose… it helped to calm nerves..”     

Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic (p. 84)