One month later...
Brakes squeal,
steam vents.
Dr. Welch and his team are pulling into a train station in Washington DC
returning, from a grueling cross-country inspection of military hospitals.
They hope to make their report
and get some rest.
Instead,
a soldier meets them on the platform with new orders.
Proceed immediately to Deven's.
Spanish Influenza
has struck the camp.
[Opening theme]
Eight hours later,
Welch and his team arrive in Massachusetts.
They find Camp Deven's
paralyzed.
Patients fill each inch of hospital space
turning blue
and coughing so hard they tear their abdominal muscles
They hemorrhage blood from their noses and scream in fever delirium.
In extreme cases,
the disease has ripped tiny holes in their lungs
oxygen leaks out
collecting beneath the victims skin
so they crackle when nurses roll them over
like the pop snap sound
of rice-cereal.
What is happening?
All training has stopped.
Recruits that aren't sick have been put into service caring for those that are.
Nearly half the camp's medical staff is ill.
Some didn't even show symptoms,
they just collapsed.
These sudden onset patients often die within 12 hours.
Those that avoid that quick death are falling to secondary pneumonia infections.
The Army has arranged special trains to take away the dead
and it's already showing up in Boston.
After a marathon session of autopsies
revealing lungs full of frothy blood,
the team turns to Welch.
He's the head of the American Medical Association
and has studied rare diseases on three continents.
Shaken, Welch says,
"This must be some kind of
new infection or plague."
Then he runs out of the room,
stepping around sick men to get to a phone.
He calls his boss
Army Surgeon General Gorgas.
"This is going to spread."
He says,
"The army needs to shut down troop movements and expand hospital space
now."
Then he calls the Rockefeller Institute and orders Dr. Oswald Avery to report to Devon's.
Avery is a peculiar man.
Like Welch, he'd shown no interest in marriage or family.
But, unlike Welch
who that private clubs and vacation in Atlantic City,
Avery had no hobbies or social life.
He is a single-minded obsessive,
who lives in an apartment next to the Institute
and talks only about his work.
If anybody could find the pathogen responsible,
Avery could.
... but they have so little time.
Several things need to happen, Welch reasons.
They need to figure out how the disease spreads and how to kill it.
... and whether they could do anything to stop it.
They need to identify the pathogen,
the bacteria or toxin that caused this disease,
so they could develop a serum,
antitoxin, or vaccine.
And that was Avery's task.
Avery who had done such good work on the pneumonia serum they tested in the summer,
which might come in handy
given all the secondary pneumonia cases.
But Welch and his team weren't the only ones hunting for the pathogen.
Long Island,
New York.
The speading Board of Health Car fishtails down the dirt road.
Inside it
sits the most unusual pair in American medicine.
In the passenger seat
hanging on for dear life
is Dr. William Park.
Behind the wheel, with her foot firmly on the accelerator,
is the labs assistant director,
Dr. Anna Williams.
The two seem almost polar opposites.
Where Park is religious,
William stouts.
He's a gentleman born to high society,
where she prefers driving fast cars and riding shotgun on stunt planes.
But in 25 years of collaboration,
they've won fame for their work on polio rabies and diphtheria.
... which is why they're speeding towards an army base.
If American doctors hope to produce a vaccine or Serum to fight this new disease,
They need Park and Williams.
No one, not even their rivals at Rockefeller,
can produce vaccine in the quantities Park can.
If they isolate the pathogen,
he can inject it into a horse,
then draw the blood
and extract the equine antibodies.
and Park
has a lot
of horses.
It's how they made enough diphtheria antitoxin to supply every doctor in New York
free of charge.
They parked the car,
tie on their masks, and get to work.
Within hours, they're heading back to the city,
the back seats stuffed full
of throat swabs, blood samples, and lung tissue
Both teams are looking for the same thing:
Bacillus influenzae
16 years earlier, the German physician Richard Pfeiffer had identified it as the cause of influenza -
a discovery so momentous that the microbe was nicknamed "Pfeiffer's bacillus."
But Pfeiffer's is difficult to identify and isolate.
A tiny error in preparation can ruin the sample,
so finding it takes time.
Meanwhile, army epidemiologists are tracking the spread of the disease.
They could actually chart it on a map,
jumping from base to base along shipping routes and rail lines.
Boston.
Philadelphia.
New York.
New Orleans.
Puget Sound.
The Great Lakes.
Sometimes, men became so sick in transit
that they had to be carried off the ships and trains when they reached their destinations.
Their initial investigation suggests it's severe influenza.
That means it's airborne and can survive for hours on hard surfaces.
The large number of secondary infections
indicate that it suppresses the immune system.
Surgeon General Gorgas tries to raise the alarm.
He insists his superiors freeze all transfers and stop the troop ships.
At the very least, they could hold the men in quarantine for a week before they board.
The military refuses.
Germany is on their last legs, they argue.
The Austrians and the Ottomans are rumored to be drafting peace offers.
This is not
the time to let up the pressure.
Nothing must distract them or the public
from the war effort.
They send out the next draft registration,
forcing thousands of men across the country to crowd into civic buildings to fill out paperwork.
Gorgas protests.
What is the point of this?
The camps have stopped all training to deal with the outbreak.
These new draftees wouldn't become fighting men,
they'd just report for duty and get flu.
Finally, a win.
The army agrees and cancels the next draft.
But it's too late.
As Gorgas battles the generals,
unit commanders are already ignoring medical advice.
At Camp Grant,
a doctor sits in the Commandant's office
telling his commander that the overcrowding situation is dangerous.
He's ignoring regulations -
too many men in the barracks and on transfer trains.
The Commandant answer
will seal his fate.
In two weeks, the doctor will be back in this office,
telling him that 500 men are dead.
The last troop train they'd sent had turned into a plague train.
1/4 of the transfers had to be hospitalized,
and the camp had run out of coffins.
Upon hearing this
the Commandant, will order the doctor out of his office...
... draw his pistol...
... and take his own life.
But that is two weeks from now.
At this moment,
he says the overcrowding is necessary.
This is war doctor
But as bad as things are in the military,
they're worse on the civilian front.
The head of the Public Health Service is in denial.
He issues a useless notice on how to avoid influenza
and collects some statistics, but does nothing more.
The military worries that raising public awareness of the flu will damage morale,
and he's not a man to stand up to the military.
And he's not alone.
In Boston, New York, and Philadelphia,
people are starting to collapse on the street or fall from horseback.
Hacking, shivering patients fill hospitals.
Employee absenteeism hikes up
but civic leaders refuse to admit the growing crisis
As Park and Williams raced to identify the Pathogen,
with half their staff ill and some dying,
the head of the New York Board of Health,
a homeopath with the no scientific training...
... denies there's an epidemic.
In Philadelphia,
the mayor and his health officials are telling the press that the outbreak is nearly over.
They continue doing so
day after day
as the death toll mounts and hospital wards fill.
The press buries flu reports in the back pages to preserve wartime morale.
After all,
panicked citizens don't show up for work at the shipyard
They don't visit their neighborhood Marine recruiter,
or buy liberty loans to fund the war effort.
And that last one is important,
because Philadelphia is about to throw the largest Liberty Loan drive in the country.
Soon, thousands will march through the city and hundreds of thousands will turn up to watch and chip in.
Doctors urge the mayor to cancel all public gatherings. he refuses
He refuses.
September 27th.
There's been progress.
Welch and his team at Camp Deven's telephone their report to Gorgas.
They found Pfeiffer's bacillus in a majority of the flu cases.
Park and Williams confirm the findings in their samples.
Now if they can isolate and grow a sample of Pfeiffer's,
They can begin work on a vaccine.
But Avery isn't so sure.
He'd found Pfeiffer's, but not consistently.
In fact, he wonders if something else is responsible:
a virus too small to see.
If so, they could only hope that when they produce the vaccine,
the horse would make antibodies for this virus as well.
It was the best they could do.
After making his report, Welch boards a train to DC.
It had been a period of exhausting,
dangerous work.
He feels bone tired,
and has a headache.
The symptoms start to show on the train ride.
He switches his ticket and gets a room at his favorite hotel in Atlantic City.
He'll remain there,
delirious, in self-imposed quarantine
for weeks.
The most respected man in American medicine is out of action,
right when the country needs him most.
Because America
was about to run out of coffins
[Ending theme]