Genetic evidence shows flu virus caused 1918 pandemic, not vaccines | Fact check

Nate Trela, USA TODAY
·4 min read
10

The claim: The 1918 flu pandemic was caused by vaccines

An Oct. 19 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) includes a video with the title “The good ol’ Kansas Flu.”

“In 1918, 50 to 100 million people died of the Spanish Flu,” a narrator says. “A few years later, a Ph.D. medical scientist wrote a book with her first-hand experiences of what was really going on. According to her book, there wasn’t really a flu, but mass vaccinations had been imposed on the population, causing flu-like symptoms, a host of different illnesses and massive deaths.”

The post was liked more than 500 times in six days.

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Our rating: False

There is physical evidence of H1N1 influenza in the tissue of victims of the 1918 pandemic, and there is no evidence that vaccines caused flu-like symptoms and millions of deaths around the world. The first flu vaccine wasn't licensed until 1945.

Remnants of flu virus found in 1918 pandemic victims

The 1918 pandemic, often called the Spanish Flu because news reports of it circulating in neutral Spain flowed freely during World War II, killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, according to the U.S. National Archives. There is a wealth of physical and anecdotal evidence demonstrating it was caused by the H1N1 influenza virus, according to experts.

“There certainly is no evidence vaccines caused it,” said Thomas Ewing, a professor at Virginia Tech whose research focus includes medical history.

The first flu vaccine wasn't licensed until 1945, after being developed by two University of Michigan scientists, according to the World Health Organization.

Among the clearest evidence a flu virus caused the pandemic is RNA of a novel strain of H1N1 influenza recovered from tissue of pandemic victims in distinct locations. Studies have detailed the process of collecting and sequencing the genetic material retrieved from samples preserved in paraffin as well as from bodies buried in a permafrost grave. In both cases, the testing found the same strain of the virus. The entire virus was fully sequenced in 2005.

“You can say with confidence that these were people infected with this particular kind of influenza in the fall of 1918 and it caused their deaths, and it has been sequenced to show it is the same,” Ewing said.

Measurements of antibody levels during the 2009 outbreak of a different H1N1 influenza virus strain further support the idea that H1N1 was circulating heavily in 1918 and 1919, according to a 2018 study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Researchers found that individuals who had lived through the earlier outbreak had higher levels of antibodies for fighting off the flu during the later outbreak.

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The claim vaccines actually caused the illnesses is unsubstantiated. The social media user never identifies the “mass vaccination” that supposedly caused flu-like symptoms and deaths, and the book apparently referenced in the video, “The Poisoned Needle: Suppressed Facts About Vaccination,” does not directly point to a vaccination campaign causing the 1918 pandemic.

Among the noteworthy events in vaccine development in the years immediately before the influenza pandemic were the licensing of a pertussis vaccine in 1915 and typhoid and rabies vaccines in 1914. A tetanus toxoid was also developed in 1914.

While cautioning they have not done research specifically into the matter, neither Ewing nor Bernice Hausman, a medical historian at Penn State who has written about the anti-vaccine movement, were aware of large vaccination programs that could have lined up timewise with the outbreak.

Hausman noted that most risks of vaccines at the time were “local and specific.” They included contamination of vaccines with bacteria, inadequately inactivated vaccines that caused diseases they were trying to prevent and vaccines that had no noticeable effects at all. Only issues of poorly deactivating a virus in a vaccine would be expected to affect more than a few people at a time, and there were no flu vaccines when the pandemic began.

USA TODAY could not reach the user who shared the post for comment.

Reuters also debunked the claim.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Spanish Flu pandemic caused by virus, not vaccines | Fact check