“Know the past or be doomed to repeat it” is a phrase that is once again astonishingly relevant. We are finding that, just as 100 years ago when the Spanish Flu hit the U.S., people are once again pushing back against the public health policies meant to protect them.
Much like the COVID-19 pandemic, the 1918 influenza was of unknown origin and went on to sweep the world. It is estimated that by the end of its reign, the 1918 influenza infected 500 million people and caused an estimated 50 million deaths. While COVID-19 confirmed infections have yet to break 100 million, the United States has already suffered approximately 421 thousand deaths, approaching the 675 thousand of the Spanish Flu.
But it is not just the swift spread that is common between now and then. Similar to the current COVID-19 “anti-maskers,” the Spanish Flu saw a San Francisco-based Anti-Mask League that formed in protest of pandemic sanitary restrictions.The complaints of the Spanish Flu’s anti-maskers, which included discomfort, ineffectiveness, and aesthetic, were not so different from those of their modern COVID-19 counterparts.
It is not hard to be sympathetic to these people’s fear. It was just as frustrating in 1918 as it is now to be asked to completely change your way of life on a dime. Wearing masks all the time, avoiding large groups, and closing schools places a new burden on the population that couples with general fear of the virus. Yet it remains incredibly difficult to be sympathetic to their actions. The labeled “mask slackers” of the past century were branded with contempt for their perceived failure to do their part to protect the public. Modern anti-maskers are facing much of the same criticism, and for good reason.
It is easy to dismiss the sheer amount of deaths from the Spanish flu as resulting from conditions unique to its time and to assume that because of medical advances, a similar pandemic would not be as deadly. However, the efficacy of these advances is further complicated by a shared characteristic between the two pandemics: disinformation. At the crux of the modern anti-mask movement lies doubt in whether the masks and safety measures are effective, due to falsehoods floating around the internet.
At the beginning of the pandemic, NAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci advised against wearing a mask. This advice was later clarified, yet the headline of an article that has yet to be taken down from Anti-Maskers, a low-effort website that caters to antimasker fears and appears to have been abandoned near its inception, reads, “Fauci Says, ‘People Should Not Be Walking Around in Masks.’” And contextless video footage of Fauci’s earlier statements have previously been spread around Facebook.
Another major source of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 virus became the former president himself. For a while, many gave him the benefit of the doubt and presumed his slip-ups were unintentional. After all, Trump has a reputation for not reading briefings. However, Bob Woodward, an investigative journalist, eventually revealed that Trump was knowingly and deliberately downplaying the dangers of the virus as he understood them. It is plausible that this may have been in an attempt to separate himself from the virus’s worsening progression before the 2020 election.
Similar to modern times, the reaction to the Spanish Flu was not always characterized by clear-cut instructions on how to prevent the disease. In fact, its name, the Spanish Flu, actually does not derive from the flu’s nation of origin. Rather, Spain was only the first place to write about it. Other countries were censored by wartime gag orders and a refusal to undermine morale.
The United States itself was not innocent of this act. At the start of World War I, Woodrow Wilson had created the Committee on Public Information, which has been characterized as “the first large-scale propaganda agency of the U.S. government.” This committee gained a rather severe reputation for suppressing the truth and free journalism in favor of the U.S. war effort. And with the Sedition Act passed in the very year of the flu, the U.S. government had an abundance of resources with which to silence the people. Even as the pandemic began to spread throughout the nation, public officials were given the power to lie about its severity.
Clearly, during both pandemics, the executive branch was a major source of misinformation. This certainly makes an understandable case for being an anti-masker during the Spanish Flu, however much they were derided at the time. If that was the only source of information during modern times, the current anti-mask movement may be nearly understandable. However, despite all of these similarities, these events are happening one hundred years apart. The world has undergone a technological revolution which has fundamentally changed how people access and interact with information. Given these changes, the anti-masker has evolved from a figure of contempt created by justifiable confusion to a figure of contempt fueled by intentional ignorance.
Today, we have an abundance of resources available to us if we want to understand COVID-19. Although the executive branch and some state governments have provided misinformation, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and state-based departments of health have consistently provided information on the most recent COVID-19 information, statistics, and science. Yet the single statement of a single man that was later retracted has been held up above each of these organizations, doing to Fauci’s outdated word what they are willing to do with anything that affirms their worldview.
Certainly, the internet has also created fertile ground for misinformation, granting malicious people the opportunity to misinform for their personal or political gain. For each new reliable source now, compared to the days of the Spanish Flu, there are individuals willing to spread conspiracy theories over scientifically-grounded facts through websites and social media. Yet, for all that misinformation is abound, credible sources with true weight behind them are obviously and abundantly spread. At a certain point, many anti-maskers are choosing what is credible according to personal desire, rather than discerning what is credible.
Both pandemics led to people falling into the trap of their own fear. They let their own need for security and desire to maintain the status quo of their lives stand above the advice of medical experts. These impulses were only encouraged by bad faith actors looking to further their own political ends. However sympathetic these impulses are, modern mask slackers have no real excuse. Reliable sources are beyond simple to find, and people know exactly what the consequences are for failing to keep their end of the social contract.
Image Credit: bIMG_1235 by Paul Becker is licensed under CC BY 2.0
