Up to 100 million people died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20. The lesson we can learn from it is that faith, selflessness and empathy as well as science are needed to defeat a virus

Donald Trump, with his blame-pout on, is still calling it “Chinese flu”. In 1918, the world knew its destructive predecessor as “Spanish flu”. In Spain, when they couldn’t find reports of a similar disease anywhere else, they started to play their own blame game and called it the “Naples Soldier” after a popular song of the moment. The reason that the Spanish couldn’t find accurate references to a new and rampaging infection was that almost all other countries in their sphere were still locked in the Great War and wartime censorship.

The origin of the virus is still contested, but the disease that was killing young and old might as well have been called “American flu”, for it may well have had its origins in United States army camps processing doughboys for the Western Front, and in the American troopships plying across the Atlantic it had an almost textbook vector for wider contagion.