2020-12-27
I must thank the US National Library of Medicine for a most interesting article (well, I found it so anyway) concerning the flu epidemics of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Whilst it sheds no light whatsoever on the Covid pandemic of 2020, it highlights both the elusive nature of the causative factor behind the epidemics, and the general propensity to make assumptions about the cause and to try to make a fortune on the back of those assumptions!
Those days were very different from today:-
- There were neither national authorities nor prestigious medical institutes to set the standards by which vaccines should be developed and tested
- There were no "Big Pharma" companies that effectively monopolised the medical industry of the time
- There was no World Health Organisation to guide a grateful world through the pandemic
- There were instead many individuals and concerned bodies medical and non-medical who stepped in with their own research (of highly variable standard) and their own vaccine products (none of which ultimately passed the tests that were finally instituted, based on statistical rigour to eliminate unwanted biasses that might skew the results).
A fascinating glimpse of the politics of epidemics back then.
The reader may care to reflect on how our own situation today may differ and in what ways these differences may be for the better, or for the worse.
