This Thursday marked 103 years since the end of the The War to End All Wars. In a very real sense though, it also marks the beginning of a war that continues to this day. A war, that until a few years ago, I didn’t really realise we were still fighting.
This is my grandfather, Benjamin Harrison “Harry” Sample. In July of 1918, he enlisted in the Army and reported to Camp Funston, Kansas for basic training. At over 6 ft tall, he was always the tallest man in the room. In the second photograph, he’s standing with the rest of his squad, he’s the tall one in the middle.
Camp Funston, 1918 
If you know your history, then you know that Camp Funston was ground zero for the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. Before the war, he had been a school teacher in a small town in the boot-heel of Missouri. The men who had enlisted expected to find themselves in the trenches, dealing with the horrors of gas attacks and mechanized warfare. Instead they quickly found themselves dealing with an unseen enemy that was quickly killing thousands of men in the Second Wave of infection. They hadn’t yet made it out of basic training. Ultimately 53,000 Americans would die in combat; but 45,000 would die from the flu.
When my grandfather recovered, the world he came back to was vastly different. My grandmother had managed to survive, but so many others hadn’t. A generation of people in Southeast Missouri had been killed. In my grandfather’s county between 1918 and 1920, 322 people died from the flu. The youngest victim was 2 months old, but the vast majority of people who died were between the ages of 14 and 40. Ultimately, over 675,000 people died in the United States from the flu during the course of the pandemic.
The virus wouldn’t be isolated until 1930. And it wouldn’t be until 2005 that the 1918 influenza virus was sequenced from a sample taken from an Inuit woman who died in 1918.
The flu would become a perennial fixture in our lives, with yearly vaccines whose efficacy varied from year to year. Pandemic outbreaks continued to occur throughout the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s.
The death toll from the flu was for the most part below the level of national attention. We had become used to 10’s of thousands dying every year from the flu. The technology for making flu vaccines hadn’t really changed since the vaccines were first recommended in the 1960s. And the result had been vaccines with a hit-or-miss efficacy. In 2018, the CDC estimated that 52,000 people died from the flu in the US.
The COVID response demonstrated that there was another way. That it was possible to go from a sequence to a very targeted mRNA therapeutic within the space of a few months. And if it could be done with COVID, then perhaps similar vaccines could be developed for other viruses like influenza, Ebola, Marburg Virus, MERS, HIV and others.
New mRNA-based flu vaccines are now entering clinical trials, and hold the promise of more effective vaccines, and perhaps even a multivalent vaccine capable of preventing both influenza and COVID. Recently, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery published a list of the vaccines currently in pre-clinical testing, and in clinical trials.
On this Remembrance Day/Veterans Day we salute the men and women who fought on that battlefield a hundred years ago, and the ones that fight on today’s battle field.
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