Irish Examiner Archives

8 May 2003

RYLE DWYER writes on the horror of the 1918-20 pandemic which the propaganda says was caused by Spanish flu (Irish Examiner, May 1).

How did they know it was the virus of Spanish flu that killed millions of civilians and soldiers?

This disaster occurred when viruses were unknown to medical science.

It took a British science team to identify the first virus in man in 1933.

As regards the origin of the outbreak, he relates that a senior US army officer suggested that the Germans might have been responsible for the bug as part of their war effort, by spreading it in theatres or where large numbers of people assembled.

Did they also spread it among their own people, killing 400,000 as reported?

Ryle would have us believe that all those American soldiers who died from non-combatant causes may have died from Spanish flu.

But US Army records show that seven men dropped dead after being vaccinated.

A report from US Secretary of War Henry L Stimson not only verified these deaths but also stated that there had been 63 deaths and 28,585 cases of hepatitis as a direct result of yellow fever vaccination during only six months of the war.

That was only one of the 14 to 25 shots given to recruits.

Army records also reveal that after vaccination became compulsory in the US Army in 1911, not only did typhoid increase rapidly but all other vaccinal diseases increased at an alarming rate.

After America entered the war in 1917, the death rate from typhoid vaccination rose to the highest point in the history of the US Army.

The deaths occurred after the shots were given in sanitary American hospitals and well-supervised army camps in France, where sanitation had been practised for years.

The report of the Surgeon-General of the US Army shows that during 1917 there were admitted into the army hospitals 19,608 men suffering from anti-typhoid inoculation and vaccinia.

This takes no account of those whose vaccine diseases were attributed to other causes.

The army doctors knew all these cases of disease and death were due to vaccination and were honest enough to admit it in their medical reports.

When army doctors tried to suppress the symptoms of typhoid with a stronger vaccine, it caused a worse form of typhoid paratyphoid.

But when they concocted an even stronger vaccine to suppress that one, they created an even worse disease Spanish flu.

After the war, this was one of the vaccines used to protect a panic-stricken world from the soldiers returning from WWI battlefronts infected with dangerous diseases.

The rest is history.

Patrick J Carroll,
Lady Lane House,
Waterford.

http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/2003/05/08/story265526733.asp