Making an apocalypse out of a pandemicWhat the 20th-century flu pandemics reveal about our response to Covid-19.sp!ked, Sep 18, 2020, Tim Black
When, in July 1957, British prime minister Harold Macmillan told a Tory Party rally that the British people ‘had never had it so good’, supplying the postwar period with its famously optimistic gloss, one historical fact tends to be overlooked: the world was in the grip of a pandemic.
Influenza A virus subtype H2N2 – known as the Asian Flu – had emerged in China in the winter of 1956-7. By April, Hong Kong had reported 250,000 cases. By June, India had recorded over a million. Later that summer, as Macmillan was basking in the postwar boom, the Asian Flu hit Britain and the US. By the time the pandemic had been contained in 1958, it is estimated to have killed about 1.1million people worldwide, including over 30,000 in the UK and over 100,000 in the US.
Yet there Macmillan was, painting a rosy picture not just of the present but of the future, too. The Labour Party was similarly unconcerned by the pandemic raging outside its door, preferring instead to address other matters it deemed more pressing, from the make-up of the shadow cabinet to arguments against unilateral nuclear disarmament, for which shadow foreign secretary Nye Bevan was heckled at that October’s party conference – held, as it happens, when UK deaths from Asian flu were at their peak.
Likewise, media coverage of the pandemic was restrained. As the historian Mark Honigsbaum wrote in the Lancet: ‘There were few hysterical tabloid newspaper headlines… Instead, the news cycle was dominated by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik and the aftermath of the fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in the UK.’
In fact, the 1957-58 influenza pandemic barely seemed to register as anything other than a public-health problem. The approach, led by local and regional medical authorities rather than central government, was pragmatic, and perhaps a little fatalistic. ‘We will have our epidemic of influenza, of a type not very different from what we know already, with complications in the usual age groups’, remarked Ian Watson, director of the College of General Practitioners’ Epidemic Observation Unit in June 1957.
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