John Barry: First, last and always, tell the truth

March 31, 2020

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

For someone who has the rare ability to reduce the mysterious power of natural disasters and viral pandemics to amazingly digestible bites – see his epic books, “Rising Tide” that chronicles the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 and “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,” which forensically examines the 1918 flu that claimed between 50-100 million lives across the globe – Tulane University public health professor John M. Barry has a message for anyone with at least a single strand of common-sense DNA.

In a time of global pestilence, pandemic and panic, governments must tell the truth to their people.

Which brings us to the coronavirus plague of 2020.

“Listen to Tony Fauci,” Barry said, referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, a physician and immunologist who has advised six presidents on HIV/AIDS and other global health threats. “He’s the only one there who is telling the truth. He’s a straight shooter.”

There is much insight to be gleaned from “The Great Influenza,” which Barry wrote in 2004 and updated with a 2018 “afterword” that, in about a dozen pages, is incredibly prescient about what the world is suffering through now with COVID-19.

If we adjusted for today’s global population of 7.6 billion, the 1918 influenza pandemic would equate to 220 million to 430 million deaths. However, Barry says, the one piece of good news is that the coronavirus does not appear to be nearly as deadly as the 1918 respiratory virus.

In addition, antibiotics available today would dramatically reduce the death toll from secondary bacterial infections.

However, Barry’s scholarship shows just how many missteps were made in 1918 that led to the wider transmission of the flu, hard lessons that seemed to slip from public consciousness in 2020.

In September 1918, the first case of a deadly flu was identified in Philadelphia, prompting civic officials to warn the public about sneezing and coughing in public. But less than two weeks later, the city hosted a parade attended by 200,000 people.

Ironically, not even social distancing seemed to be effective against the 1918 avian flu. The Army studied 120 training camps: 99 placed their soldiers under quarantine while 21 did not, and there was no significant difference in mortality rates.

Actually, six camps did impose strict measures, and those camps fared much better than the others. But as Barry points out, if the Army can’t enforce stringent social distancing, how could the general public be expected to do so?

The truth? A universal vaccine is the only silver bullet that would protect humans. Research today, Barry writes, centers on something called the virus’ hemagglutinin, which looks like a head of broccoli. Current vaccines focus on the “head,” but because that part of the virus mutates rapidly, the universal vaccine needs to target the “stalk,” which has been much more difficult to attack.

So, as we seek to “flatten the curve” of the number of coronavirus cases, Barry says what the medical experts say is true: Wash your hands.

“Discipline matters,” he says.

This is not just anecdotal. In a post-mortem of the SARS outbreak in 2003, most of the dead were health care workers who were suspected of not completely following safety protocols.

In 2018, Barry surmised what might happen in the most virulent of pandemics: Governments would shutter theaters, bars, restaurants and schools and even close down church services. Every prediction has come true.

In 1918, Barry wrote about priests walking down Philadelphia’s empty streets, almost like the flower and vegetable barkers in “Oliver Twist,” shouting: “Bring out your dead!”

Call it the terror of the unknown.

“It was pretty terrifying when you’re being lied to by the public, by the authorities,” Barry said. “One of the papers went so far as to say this was not a public health measure. There was no cause for alarm. How stupid did they think people were? So, when you have no information and you had bodies literally – not figuratively – piling up, that’s pretty terrifying.”

Even more puzzling, to this day, was the end of the 1918 flu. It suddenly vanished.

“It just ran its course,” Barry said.

As Americans, as Catholics, we need to be in search of the truth.

“If there is a single dominant lesson from 1918,” Barry writes, “it’s that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis. … You don’t manage the truth. You tell the truth.”

Buy the book.

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org.