28 December

Why do I persist with attention to Covid? This graph helps explain why. What’s not widely known is that we had a global pandemic through most of the 20th century. Heart disease. Some really bad science made us think that was due to bad diet and lack of exercise. It wasn’t that. Look at when heart disease took off. Immediately after the Spanish Flu pandemic. Heart disease has been in free fall since the 1960s, which corresponds exactly with the dying of those who lived through the Spanish Flu pandemic. There was a huge surge of it from 1920-1950s, and then it started to fall off a cliff. There was no widespread heart disease before the Spanish Flu hit. The Spanish Flu created ongoing chronic health problems, including a mass epidemic of heart disease (look at the graph!) that nobody saw as an infectious disease problem, because we only pay attention to the short-term acute effects of having an infection. Just as we’re now doing with Covid.