An entirely reasonable and sensible question from Martin Kettle in The Guardian:
A century on, why are we forgetting the deaths of 100 million?
Martin Kettle
Quite so, quite so.
The 1918 Spanish flu outbreak killed more people than both world wars. Don’t imagine such a thing could never happen again
Ah, it’s not about the 100 million killed by socialism as a warning to not do it again.
I wonder why not?
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Of course it will happen again; one reason we are here on this rock is that DNA is so darned easy to mutate. That author asks why we don't commemorate it, as we do certain other anniversaries that he names. The reason is that there is no point to doing so, except to use it as a segue to a political agenda. He names "greater care in the naming of subsequent strains and outbreaks that cross borders," gives a nod to Global Warming, and credits the flu indirectly for the creation of the NHS 30 years later.
In fact, we will not fight the next epidemic, US-style, by centralizing all information in the capital (making Affordable Health Care unaffordable by requiring the hiring of as many coders as there are practitioners and forcing them to learn the current manual of statistical designations) or by demanding that innovators prove safety and efficacy before doing business. (The US "Right to Try" legislation just enacted is a safety value for terminally ill patients around a bureaucracy the governing party is curiously unable to repeal, another law that makes Trump's superlatives ring hollow.) We will fight it by adapting faster than the virus does, with the widespread prosperity that follows individual liberty. Or, we won't.
Of course it will happen again; one reason we are here on this rock is that DNA is so darned easy to mutate. That author asks why we don't commemorate it, as we do certain other anniversaries that he names. The reason is that there is no point to doing so, except to use it as a segue to a political agenda. He names "greater care in the naming of subsequent strains and outbreaks that cross borders," gives a nod to Global Warming, and credits the flu indirectly for the creation of the NHS 30 years later.
In fact, we will not fight the next epidemic, US-style, by centralizing all information in the capital (making Affordable Health Care unaffordable by requiring the hiring of as many coders as there are practitioners and forcing them to learn the current manual of statistical designations) or by demanding that innovators prove safety and efficacy before doing business. (The US "Right to Try" legislation just enacted is a safety value for terminally ill patients around a bureaucracy the governing party is curiously unable to repeal, another law that makes Trump's superlatives ring hollow.) We will fight it by adapting faster than the virus does, with the widespread prosperity that follows individual liberty. Or, we won't.