Kegsbreath: We are discarding the mandatory flu vaccine requirement, effective immediately.

[Ocelot II]

28. The Spanish Flu of 1918 started with US army troops.

One of the first recorded cases was on March 11, 1918, at Fort Riley in Kansas. Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions created a fertile breeding ground for the virus. Within one week, 522 men had been admitted to the camp hospital suffering from the same severe influenza. Soon after, the army reported similar outbreaks in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and California. Navy ships docked at East Coast ports also reported outbreaks of severe influenza and pneumonia among their crews. The flu seemed to target military personnel and not civilians, so the virus was largely overshadowed by hotter current affairs such as Prohibition, the suffragette movement and the bloody battles in Europe.

By May 1918, influenza began to subside in the United States. But the ordeal was by no means over. Soldiers at Fort Riley, now ready for battle, incubated the virus during their long, cramped voyage to France. Once they hit French shores, the virus exploded, striking the Allied forces and Central Powers with equal force....

From the battlefields of Europe, the epidemic quickly evolved into a pandemic, as the disease spread north to Norway, east to China, southeast to India and as far south as New Zealand. Even islands weren't safe. Hitching rides on naval ships and carriers, merchant vessels and trains, the virus traveled to the four corners of the earth. By the summer of 1918, it had hit Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, the Philippines and Hawaii. The epidemic wreaked havoc on Puerto Rico but surprisingly barely touched the Panama Canal Zone, the crossroads of the world at the time. The steamship Harold Walker is blamed for bringing Spanish flu to Tampico, Mexico. Within four short months, the virus had rounded the globe and returned once more to U.S. shores.

The second and third waves of Spanish flu slammed the United States in the cold-weather months of 1918. This time civilians were not immune. The country's indigenous people, particularly Native Alaskans, suffered disproportionately. The flu completely wiped out some villages in Alaska, and others lost most of their adult population. Big-city dwellers faired poorly too. New York City buried 33,000 victims. Philadelphia lost nearly 13,000 people in a matter of weeks. Overwhelmed with bodies, many cities soon ran out of coffins and some had to convert streetcars into hearses to keep up with demand.

https://www.paho.org/en/who-we-are/history-paho/purple-death-great-flu-1918

Now we have vaccines to prevent this sort of thing from happening. But we also have Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr., so..