We all know that the “Spanish Flu” started at the end of World War I in 1918. One of the things people don’t know is that censorship in the warring nations prevented it from being reported properly. In Spain, however, being neutral, there was no need for censorship. On 22 May 1918 the epidemic made the headlines there, and the Spanish King, Alfonso XIII, became ill a week later. Hence the connection to Spain, where it was known instead, with at least a little more accuracy, as the “French Flu.” (See here.)

At this time virology was not a recognised science. The first human virus to be isolated was Yellow Fever, some fourteen years later in 1932. The word “Influenza” originated from the Latin “influentia,” meaning “influence of the stars,” more than one hundred years earlier. In World War I it simply did not have the meaning we ascribe to it today. In using the term “Spanish Flu,” people were referring simply to an unspecified epidemic respiratory illness thought to have started in Spain.

On March 4, almost three months before King Alfonso became ill, the first soldier known to have “influenza” was reported at Camp Funston in the USA. “First reported”, of course, does not mean the same as the first case. It means the first that was reported. Only two weeks later, thousands of men there were sick. The name “Camp Funston” conjures up a temporary, tented military base. It was nothing of the sort. It was part of the countless acres of Fort Riley, and was itself a huge area set up to train men for the First War. It was one of sixteen such new camps, and the largest of them all. As the first clear outbreak of the “Spanish Flu” was there, Fort Riley/Camp Funston is naturally where we should look for origins of the pandemic.

A certain U. S. Army Doctor, Frederick L. Gates, working with The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, (now Rockefeller University) had tested a new vaccine on thousands of men at Fort Riley. His report can be found here on the Rockefeller University Press website, published on 1st October 1918, and also here, dated as “submitted for publication on 20th July” that year. (The date is significant.) The full report is well worth reading. Below we look only at some salient points. Three significant matters are noted first.

Significant Matters

1  One of the mysteries of “Spanish Flu” was that it attacked healthy young men. Flu preferentially attacks the very young and very old. This is an extremely strong indication that the “Spanish Flu” was not flu at at all, but some other pneumonia-causing infection.

2 The research was aimed at finding a vaccine for meningitis. However, meningitis is a set of symptoms which may be caused by any one of several different infectious agents. A main cause of serious meningitis is pneumococcus bacteria, which also causes pneumonia. Today we readily distinguish pneumococcal meningitis from meningococcal meningitis. The Doctor’s report only refers to “meningococcus”, although he is well aware of different types and writes at some length about them.

3 The report is couched in very polite and positive terms. It also sounds genuinely scientific to anyone who is not thinking critically as they read it. Given that the Doctor’s practical work was complete by the end of February (see below), it is a little strange that his report was not submitted for publication until 20th July, for it is not especially long. However, if Dr F. L. Gates began writing it in March, that would have coincided precisely with the beginning of the epidemic. He must have spent a long time wondering how he could discuss the contagion while demonstrating that it was not connected to his vaccine. In the end, his report omits any mention at all of the epidemic, and he never uses the word “pneumococcus.” Either of those would have immediately suggested a connection between his February vaccinations and the catastrophic pneumonia that followed in March.

Points from the Report

1 The first paragraph tells us that there was a “preliminary series of vaccinations on a relatively small number of volunteers . . . . Following this, the vaccine was offered . . . .to all who wished to take it.” Given the military’s belief in vaccines and the stringency of military discipline, it is reasonable to assume that this actually meant everybody.

2 There was some rudimentary testing of dosages on about 300 men, leading to a decision to further test three injections at weekly intervals on nearly 5,000. Each dose was double the previous dose. Only about 4,000 of the original 5,000 received the third dose. We are not told what happened to the other thousand. In a supposedly accurate and complete scientific report this is astonishing, reprehensible, and deeply suspicious.

3 There are many reports of reactions to the vaccine on the mornings following injection. However, any reaction days, weeks or months later seem to be assumed to be irrelevant.

4 The report states that “In some regiments the vaccinations had been completed before February 5.” It is not stated how long it took to carry out all the vaccinations. Since there was a one week interval between each injection, we might reasonably assume that they were all complete by the end of February.

So we know that a truly exceptional illness, not like a flu, erupted in Fort Riley by March, following the vaccinations in the two months before. And also that from there men were shipped to France, from where the Spanish believe they received the plague later. If we look for some unusual cause in Fort Riley, it seems to be staring us in the face: the vaccine caused the Pandemic. Is there an alternative explanation for the origin?

Alternative Explanation?

There is just one. In a 2,500 word article here, J M Barry reaches the conclusion that the disease jumped from animals to men in Haskell County, about 300 miles from Fort Riley. He takes almost half of his article to review possible origins outside of the USA, and concludes, correctly, that it started in the US, and specifically in Kansas, where both Camp Funston and Haskell County are located.

We need to digress here into the Barry article and the references he gives. He quotes eight references, the first of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is his own book, “The Great Influenza: the Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History”, published in 2004. He also makes reference in the text to Jeffery K Taubenberger’s work on proving the viral connection of “Spanish Flu”. But he only cites a personal letter, with no further details, for this obviously vital piece of research.

I searched the web, but could not find it that research. What I did find was a paper by Taubenberger and others about the 1918 Pandemic. It’s rather long, and very speculative (here.) For example, it opens by presenting six key questions regarding that pandemic. The six corresponding answers use the words “unknown . . . not documented . . . unknown . . . unknown . . . unknown . . . insufficient evidence.” I found the paper both verbose and hypothetical, but one hard fact stood out: “The major bacteria identified in the pandemic were the organisms now called Streptococcus pneumoniae.” This statement that was followed by “Accumulating evidence suggests that nearly all deaths in 1918 were associated with bacterial pneumonia.” Streptococcus pneumoniae, or pneumococcal meningitis, is, of course, what Dr F L Gates was trying to vaccinate against.

Now we can return to Barry’s key revelation, which concerns a Dr. Loring Miner. Dr Miner reported a very unusual illness in Haskell County in February, though his report only refers to deaths there on 30th March. Barry swiftly concludes that the illness jumped from animals to men in Haskell County, and was then carried to Camp Funston by recruits to the Army. Yet even he writes a paragraph about two-way traffic between Camp Funston and Haskell County that starts with “All Army personnel from the county reported to Funston for training. Friends and family visited them at Funston. Soldiers came home on leave, then returned to Funston.” It is not therefore clear which direction the infection originally travelled in. Was it Haskell to Funston? Or Funston to Haskell? The dates alone make both possibilities equally likely. How does Barry dismiss the possibility of an origin caused by the Funston vaccine? Simply, he never mentions the experimental vaccinations at all. From a man who has written a book on the 1918 Pandemic, that is a very significant omission.

Conclusion

Consequently we have one known and obvious potential cause of the disease, and one highly speculative one. Occam’s Razor, (sometimes glossed as KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid!) which is fully endorsed and used by modern science, allows only the first proposition. The Pandemic was indeed caused by improperly-tested vaccines.

But . . .

The conclusion may be obvious. However, currently mega-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is intent on injecting every person on the planet with improperly-tested vaccines. In this he is at one with the sixty-billion-dollar vaccine industry. It would be most inconvenient for them if the public saw vaccines as potentially disastrous. Hence we should expect a massive push-back against any suggestion that the earlier Gates’s work was a catastrophe. And there is.

Wikipedia has nothing but praise for Barry’s book, and tells us “President George W. Bush read the book . . . .His study would later set forth plans for the federal government to prepare for future pandemics” and also that “The book is experiencing a surge in popularity as a result of . . . COVID-19.” (Wikipedia here.) Clearly this book has great influence and is therefore a key part of the push-back; but further push-back is necessary to counter the obvious conclusion that Fort Riley was a man-made calamity.

It is not hard to find. Many sources state that 1918 was not only flu, but H1N1 flu. See, for example Wikipedia here and US Center for Disease Control (CDC) here. The statement is always made with total confidence and without caveats, and therefore appears authoritative and settled. Few people would pause to consider how this might come to be the case. For anyone who does, there is an obvious answer. It is that Doctors at the time were baffled by the disease, and therefore preserved many tissue samples from deceased patients for future research; these samples have now been studied by different modern scientists, who found H1N1 virus in all of them, and have published their peer-reviewed papers. Checking such peer-reviewed papers would provide the proof.

The truth is quite different. Contemporary Doctors were not confused. Even the Taubenberger paper already referred to admits to Streptococcus pneumoniae as the major bacteria  in the pandemic. Doctors at the time thought that they were simply dealing with an epidemic pneumonia made worse by the War. There was no need to keep tissue samples for further research, and almost universally they did not. So how did anyone find an H1N1 virus in tissue from 1918?

The short answer is that they didn’t. What they did do is described in a very long article (7,250 words) on the CDC website here. The article begins like a detective novel describing the hunt for tissue, moves through a lot of detail about flu viruses in general and virus creation, and ends with declaring the necessity of preparing for future epidemics and having vaccines. That’s not exactly a scientific paper, and the references are little better. The short story is that they managed to find tissues from just three individuals, in which they found only tiny fragments of viral RNA, never a whole virus. Doubtless they could have found many other things, but flu was the only thing they were searching for. From these fragments they were able to re-create a flu virus which proved deadly to mice. They think the virus probably came from a bird, somehow adapted to infect humans, and evidently now also infects mice. According to them, viruses do a lot of jumping around different species.

The article proves nothing about 1918, since tiny fragments of RNA and DNA can be found in many places. And it is abundantly obvious that the CDC article is written to convince people of the desirability of vaccination, and also mass Government intervention in epidemics. What it does prove is that scientists can create viruses in a laboratory. And also that they are even happy to recreate what they believe to be possibly the most dangerous virus ever. These same scientists using similar technology can also create vaccines, so we might view them as Hero Saviours. That is on the assumption, of course, that they did not first create a relevant virus, and that vaccines themselves never create problems.

Further Proof

Should we need more proof of the vaccination origin of the 1918 woes, it is provided by a significant Reuters article. The article is a “FACTCHECK”. It begins: “Shared 582 times as of March 31 2020, a 2018 post (here) on a page called “Stop Mandatory Vaccination”, claims that the 1918 Influenza Epidemic was a Vaccine-caused Disease. This claim is false.”

The original post is no longer available, but the case of it having been shared around 600 times in about eighteen months is evidently sufficient cause for the mighty Reuters to weigh in with the “truth”. Happily, in a debate, weak arguments on either side are just as useful as strong arguments in deciding which is correct. (The article is appended below.) After the introduction already quoted, it goes on to state “The claim that the influenza pandemic of 1918 was the after-effect of the massive nation-wide vaccine campaign is unfounded.” Whether the post really mentioned a nation-wide vaccine is of course now impossible to check. However, what becomes clear on reading is that Reuters, having been alerted to the possibility of a vaccine causing the Pandemic, have checked absolutely nothing of relevance!

They devote one fifth of their article to knocking down the “Straw Man” argument about an influenza vaccine. Another fifth is taken up proving that vaccination had been used by the US Army in the past for some other diseases, which is irrelevant. They go on to say that “the origins of the Spanish flu outbreak are unknown,” a mere assertion, and one that quietly ignores the fact that this is exactly the matter under consideration. They continue with “it is known to have been an H1N1 Influenza”, as ever without detail about how we know that, and ignoring the reality that the illness did not behave like influenza. They finish by simply restating their claims in different ways.

So having tried, Reuters could find no way to counter the case for a vaccine causing the Pandemic. Like other commentators, they can only move to a non-vaccine conclusion by totally hiding the Fort Riley experiment. Hence they provide all the further evidence needed to prove that 1918 was indeed caused by a vaccine. One might wonder why they even bother to keep this article on their site. However, there is a very good reason. Anyone who reads it, having not first read the post to which it refers (which now is not possible anyway) would find it quite convincing. And if such a person then hears from someone else that 1918 was caused by vaccination, they will naturally respond with “Oh yes, I heard that one. It’s been debunked.”

Finally

The crucial question here is “Are vaccines a solution or a problem? Or a mixture of the two?” If it is necessary to cover up the Fort Riley experiments with the name “Spanish Flu”, or Barry’s biased book, or Taubenberger and other’s lab-made virus research, or Reuter’s corrupt fact-checking, then the answer, at best, is that vaccines can not only be a problem, but also a catastrophic one.

The Fort Riley events, and their alleged explanation about a virus jumping from animals to man, links to a second vital question. Do viruses really jump from animals to men? Or are they animal viruses engineered in a laboratory? The Haskell County story gives a powerful boost to the premise that they do jump. The facts of the matter show this to be a lie for the 1918 Pandemic. Is the whole idea that they jump also a lie?

It is not possible to overstate the seriousness of this. For those of us who have followed the unfolding Covid story, it has become very clear that the politicians are not at all “following the science” as they claim, but some other agenda that has nothing at all to do with science. And the media only follow or exaggerate the political claims. Whether that agenda is to do with Big Pharma profits, or a new (Second Wave) Pandemic to cull the World population in order to forestall climate catastrophe, or some other grotesque motivation, is the ultimate question. What is clear already, is that the lies we are being fed go back a long way. And there is nothing more twisted and corrupt than using a century old pandemic to strike fear into people, and then to use that fear to manipulate them into taking an improperly tested vaccine, when just such a vaccine was exactly what generated that pandemic.

Endnote

I am immensely grateful to Kevin Barry (no connection to J M Barry referred to above) for the original exposure of this. See his article from February this year here. I have to say that I was disbelieving when I first read it, so had to do my own research. That research, with my scribblings, evolved into this article. You may prefer Kevin Barry’s. Either way, the narrative here needs to go mainstream. 1918 was a mega pandemic; it is also a mega lie. And dismantling that first big lie is a good start to dismantling the framework of Covid lies that now permeates politics and media.

Reuters Fact-Check, here on the web, and below:

APRIL 1, 2020 / 10:38 PM / 4 MONTHS AGO

False claim: the 1918 influenza pandemic was caused by vaccines

6 MIN READ

Shared 582 times as of March 31, 2020, a 2018 post ( here ) on a page called “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” claims that “the 1918 Influenza Epidemic was a Vaccine-caused Disease.” This claim is false.

The claim that the influenza pandemic of 1918 “was the after-effect of the massive nation-wide vaccine campaign” is unfounded. A vaccine against the flu did not exist at the time. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), having “no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections” meant that “control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.” ( here )

According to the CDC report “Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999,” prior to 1900, the vaccines for smallpox, rabies, typhoid, cholera and plague had been developed in the U.S. (see Table 1 here ). The report states that “although the first vaccine against smallpox was developed in 1796, greater than 100 years later its use had not been widespread enough to fully control the disease… Four other vaccines — against rabies, typhoid, cholera, and plague — had been developed late in the 19th century but were not used widely by 1900.”

It is true that U.S. soldiers during World War I were subject to immunization requirements. However, it is not true, as the post claims, that this was the first major conflict in which this happened. Published by the National Institute of Health (NIH)’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in 2018, a paper ( here ) called “The US Military Commitment to Vaccine Development: A Century of Successes and Challenges,” says that “the first large-scale smallpox infection prevention campaign was conducted in 1777 by the Continental Army.”

In addition, a 2006 paper called “Immunization to Protect the US Armed Forces: Heritage, Current Practice, and Prospects,” published here by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, says that American servicemen underwent some version of smallpox immunization in the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the Civil War (1861-1865), and the Spanish-American War (1898). (See Table 2: “Immunizations used widely during major conflicts”) During World War I, soldiers were given live smallpox and whole cell typhoid inoculations, as well as therapeutic tetanus and diphtheria antitoxins. “With a vaccine to shield troops from typhoid bacteria during the unsanitary conditions of World War I,” the paper says, “a mere approximately 2,000 cases of typhoid fever, with 227 deaths, were reported among 4.1 million Americans in uniform.

Killing an estimated 675,000 Americans ( virus.stanford.edu/uda/ ), the 1918 H1N1 flu pandemic (also referred to as the “Spanish Influenza” or “Spanish flu”) was indeed the deadliest flu pandemic in modern history ( here ).

The outbreak of the “Spanish flu” was recorded in Spain in May 1918, several months before the November 11, 1918 armistice ending WWI. In the U.S., “it was first identified in military personnel in spring 1918” and that “crowded conditions and the movement of troops during World War I likely contributed to the spread of the 1918 virus around the world,” according to the CDC ( here , here ).

The specific origins of the “Spanish flu” outbreak are unknown, but it is known to have been an H1N1 Influenza “with genes of avian origins” ( here ). In terms of geography, “France, China and Britain have all been suggested as the potential birthplace of the virus, as has the United States” according to the history channel ( here ).

Finally, the claim that “more of our men were being killed by medical shots than by enemy shots from guns” is unsubstantiated. There is no evidence to show any vaccine killed more men than “enemy shots from guns”. According to a paper called “The U.S. Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919,” by the NCBI in 2010, it was “influenza and pneumonia [that] killed more American soldiers and sailors during the war than did enemy weapons.” ( here ) The U.S. did not develop the first influenza vaccine until the 1940s ( here ) and the first pneumonia vaccine until 1977 ( here ).

VERDICT

False: the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic was not caused by vaccines, WWI was not the first time that immunization was required for U.S. soldiers, more U.S. soldiers were killed by influenza and pneumonia, not “medical shots,” than by enemy fire during WWI.