The 1918 flu as a vaccine injury

As told: in 1918 the US Army ran mass trials of experimental bacterial vaccines — chiefly Rockefeller Institute anti-meningococcal serum — on soldiers at Fort Riley and elsewhere, and the pandemic began in precisely those camps. On this account what spread was not a virus but the consequence of those inoculations, carried worldwide by troop movements. A separate and more evidence-backed strand holds that the extreme aspirin regimens then recommended produced pulmonary oedema and salicylate toxicity, and that a substantial share of the deaths were iatrogenic.

Eleanor McBean set out the vaccine-origin version in The Poisoned Needle (1957) from a naturopathic anti-vaccination tradition; it remained a fringe text until 2020, when it was rediscovered and circulated widely online. The aspirin strand has a different and more respectable origin: Karen Starko, an epidemiologist, published it in Clinical Infectious Diseases in 2009. The two arguments are routinely presented online as one.

Paraphrased summaries of publicly circulating reports, not verbatim quotes from identified individuals. Unverified by definition.

• “A family history posted online recounts a great-grandfather who died at a training camp in 1918 shortly after a series of inoculations, and the descendants' belief that the injections rather than the influenza killed him.”

  reported harmReported 2020

  Paraphrased from publicly circulating genealogical accounts. No medical records accompany it.

• “A nurse's memoir excerpt, widely recirculated, describes patients turning blue and bleeding from the nose and ears under the heavy salicylate regimens of the period, and the writer's later suspicion that the treatment was killing people the illness might not have.”

  reported harmReported 1918

  Paraphrased from circulating excerpts of period nursing accounts. The salicylate concern is supported by later published analysis.

The two halves have very different standing. The aspirin argument is taken seriously: dosing guidance in 1918 reached levels now known to cause toxicity, the timing of the US mortality spike is suggestive, and Starko's paper is cited rather than dismissed — though it is proposed as a contributor to mortality, not as the cause of the pandemic. The vaccine-origin argument does not survive the geography. The 1918 virus killed on a comparable scale in rural India, Western Samoa, Alaskan villages and Iran, in populations that had received no vaccine of any kind and had no contact with US Army camps; Western Samoa lost roughly a fifth of its population. The pathogen itself was sequenced in 2005 from preserved lung tissue and a body exhumed from Alaskan permafrost: an H1N1 influenza A virus, reconstructed and studied directly. A bacterial vaccine cannot produce an influenza virus genome. Secondary bacterial pneumonia did cause most of the deaths, which is the grain of truth the bacterial framing sits on.