Half a century ago stoic Britons battled a similar health crisis without any lockdown
The last global pandemic, of influenza, eventually killed a shocking 80,000 British citizens in 1968
As the Apollo 8 spacecraft passed the halfway mark to the Moon, commander Colonel Frank Borman and his companions reported they were feeling unwell. On hearing their symptoms, one official in ground control remarked: “I’m not a doctor, but it sounds like Asian flu.”
Debate raged in Houston about what to do, amid fears that the astronauts had caught the H3N2 strain of influenza after meeting President Lyndon Johnson – who had spent his final weeks at the White House fighting the disease – just before their mission. It was soon decided that they likely had little more than nausea, and so were free to become the first crew to fly to the Moon, orbit it and return. If they suffered any worse in their December 1968 flight, drastic action would have been necessary.
The pandemic had been raging since July, when it was first picked up in Hong Kong, prompting some to name it after the then British colony. Others referred to it as “Mao flu” given the widespread belief it had originated in China, coming across the river from Macau. It was not possible to determine for sure as the Chinese were not then members of the World Health Organisation, and so evaded monitoring by its national influenza centres. This flu was the first helped to spread by mass air travel, spreading swiftly though South-east Asia. Troops brought it unwittingly to America on their return from the Vietnam War. In return, 200 British soldiers had their leave delayed after one of them was found to have caught the flu on their return from Colorado.
Like the ongoing coronavirus, most people survived the Asian flu, with it deemed a relatively mild disease normally healthy people would recover from after several days. One Hong Kong official told journalists that anyone infected should stay at home and rest, adding: “In the meantime, they can take aspirin, tea, lemon drinks, whisky or brandy according to taste.” But it was highly contagious, which raised concerns about how vulnerable the elderly would be. A spokesperson for the UK’s Medical Research Council warned that it would “spread through the country like wildfire”, as doctors feared it could prove particularly lethal that winter as part of a three-pronged assault alongside existing flu strains.
The worldwide response to the Asian flu was similar in many ways to Covid-19, with a greater degree of handwashing. But people still went to work, avoiding any lockdown while staying socially distant by avoiding packed public transportation in favour of walking. Dr Joan Gomez captured this stoic attitude in her advice to Telegraph readers at the start of 1969, urging them to “boost your resistance with a decent breakfast before plunging into the battleground of rush-travel”.
The economy continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace, as governments prevented a recession by refraining from shutting down industry. As Philip Snashall, a now retired professor of medicine whose daughter contracted at the age of two the first case of the Asian flu to hit Europe, recorded in the
“The stock market did not plummet, we were not besieged by the press, men in breathing apparatus did not invade my daughter’s play group.”
Society and business did not stop as the Asian flu ran through the population. Schools stayed open, with the Department of Health acknowledging there had been two outbreaks, but by early 1969 it had not spread beyond that. Doctors argued that younger people aged between five and 25 tended to have enough antibodies to be effectively immune.
Sports were still played, with Fulham’s second division league football match against Preston a rare casualty after having to be called off – only because 11 of the club’s players had the flu rather than for public safety concerns about the crowds.
Meanwhile, there was an intense scramble to produce enough vaccines to keep up with the expected demand, reportedly on 24-hour production schedules. Harold Wilson’s Labour government insisted that it would meet its target to have 900,000 doses of vaccine ready by the end of the year in order to protect high-risk cases.
“The demand has been unprecedented,” the boss of one drug manufacturer said in November 1968. “We have sold in a few days what we would have sold in a year.” Companies had to wrestle with snags, with some of the doses they produced not being potent enough to work, making the available supply much scarcer. This made the Conservative-controlled Greater London Council’s decision to order 2,000 for its own employees all the more controversial. “We have services to run and we must run them,” a spokesman explained, pointing out that the vaccinated key workers included sewer, fire and ambulance men. This came amid frustration among business leaders, who were struggling to obtain vaccines to protect their staff.
Just as the British people are under pressure to “save the NHS”, the health service then was feeling the strain. The Papworth Chest and Heart Hospital in Cambridgeshire reported that it had to delay operations as the flu had struck down one fifth of its nursing staff. Soon after, hospitals in London issued a yellow warning due to the rise of emergency admissions. The Government’s own flu minister, David Ennals, had to withdraw from constituency engagements after coming down with the disease.
The tide turned against Asian flu at the start of 1969. Thousands of doses of vaccine were now being distributed as health experts sought to save face for the flu had not proved to be as severe as originally forecast. “Influenza is so unpredictable that it would wou be foolish to forecast what wh may happen,” a Department Dep for Health spokesman spo said.
Some S doctors had predicted pre that a natural immunity, im built up by the flu pandemic that had erupted er a decade earlier in 1957, 19 would dampen its severity. se With demand for vaccines v plummeting, British B drug companies had h built up such a great surplus that they started exporting them th elsewhere.
The early warning provided by Hong Kong back in June 1968 was credited with giving authorities enough time to prepare vaccines and to protect their people. British drug firms took the lead in the early months, with the Ministry of Health doing little more at the time than passing public enquiries on to them. This first wave from the Asian flu may not have prompted an economic shutdown, but the illness it caused among the workforce was estimated to have resulted in the loss of millions of man-hours in production. However, one reader wrote to The Telegraph bemoaning the “somewhat excessive” anxiety about the epidemic, concluding on Dec 23 1968 that the flu was to be “gravely feared only by the already infirm” and praised health chiefs for doing “extraordinarily well, while getting pathetically little credit for their labours”.
In the aftermath of the first wave, drug companies urged ministers to encourage annual vaccinations so that the population could be better protected against future virulent epidemics. A drug company boss complained: “Normally at this time of year when you have supplies nobody wants to know. When there’s an epidemic everybody wants it.” Their suggestion turned out to be prescient, as the Asian flu resurfaced in a second wave at the end of 1969, which ended up being even deadlier. By the spring of 1970, it had killed more than one million people worldwide, 80,000 of them in the UK. Perhaps the 1968 pandemic did not prompt a worldwide economic shutdown because the generation in power had a more sanguine attitude towards diseases.
They had to contend with ailments like measles and mumps, and had only a few years earlier found a vaccine for polio. Nowadays, the H3N2 virus is still prevalent as a seasonal malady. In the same way, it is only a matter of time before Covid-19 joins this strain of flu as something else people will want to vaccinate themselves against.
‘Perhaps the pandemic did not prompt a worldwide shutdown because of a more sanguine attitude to disease’