Salem Lorot’s Reviews > The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History > Status Update

"I thought it would take me two and a half years to write, three at the most. That plan didn't work. Instead this book took seven years to write."

"So even with all the medical advances since 1918, the CDC estimates that if a new pandemic virus strikes, then the U.S. death toll will most likely fall between 89,000 and 300,000. It also estimates a best case scenario of 75,000 deaths and a worst case scenario in which 422,000 Americans would die."

"Every expert on influenza agrees that the ability of the influenza virus to reassort genes means that another pandemic not only can happen. It almost certainly will happen."

"Nothing in science is as damning as the inability of an outside experimenter to reproduce results."

"It seems to me a crying pity that men who have given years to the necessary preparation for a lab career should be so ruthlessly drawn away from it and made to fill executive positions."

"They grew huge amounts of virulent Type III pneumococci, and spent not just hours or days but months and years breaking the bacteria down, looking at each constituent part, trying to understand. The work was of the utmost tedium, and it was work that yielded failure after failure after failure."

"So, lacking other candidates, many scientists remained convinced Pfeiffer's did cause the disease, including most of those at the Rockefeller Institute."

"The greatest questions remained the simplest ones: What caused influenza? What was the pathogen? Was Pfeiffer right when he identified a cause and named it Bacillus influenzae? And if he was not right, then what did cause it? What was the killer?"

"The virus was still not finished. All through the spring of 1919 a kind of rolling thunder moved above the earth, intermittent, unleashing sometimes a sudden localized storm, sometimes even a lightning bolt, and sometimes passing over with only a rumble of threatened violence in the distant and dark sky. It remained violent to do one more thing."

"By late November, with few exceptions the virus had made its way around the world. The second wave was over, and the world was exhausted. And man was about to become the hunter."