I’ve not read the Spinney book but the John Barry book is an excellent read.
There was also a good documentary on PBS – The American Experience - Influenza 1918
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCFJPDqKPgc
As I stated earlier, there is no doubt that many who died during this pandemic died from Pneumonia. However, the pneumonia was an opportunistic infection that took advantage of the damage caused by the H1N1 virus.
This is correct. It also needs to be understood that in 1918, while bacteria had been observed under the microscope for many years and were known to cause disease, Louis Pasteur and Edward Jenner developed the first vaccines to protect against viral infections even as they did not know that viruses existed because they (viruses) were too small to be seen under the microscopes at the time (scientists did not actually see viruses for the first time until the 1930s. That’s when the electron microscope was invented) but it had been hypothesized that something other than bacteria were at play in some diseases. In 1918, the science of virology was at its earliest stages.
It was only in 1915, that English bacteriologist Frederick Twort discovered bacteriophage, the viruses that attack bacteria. He noticed tiny clear spots within bacterial colonies, and hypothesized that something was killing the bacteria. And only in 1892 – Dimitrii Ivanovsky observed that agent of tobacco mosaic disease passes through porcelain filters that retain bacteria.
FWIW some early cases of "Spanish Flu" were misdignosed as menigitis.
MD Expat in PA wrote: “FWIW some early cases of “Spanish Flu” were misdignosed as menigitis.”
I’ve done quite a bit of reading about the Spanish Flu. It killed my paternal grandmother in the third wave, ie, 1920.
It’s not been exactly established that the flu began at Fort Riley. It’s fairly certain in didn’t begin in Spain. It’s very possible that the spanish flu jumped from pigs in a rather small farming community some distance from Fort Riley. Draftees moving to Fort Riley from that town might have been the source. It certainly wasn’t a pneumonia vaccine that started this.