The value of exporting wine to Russia

Russia has been in the news a bit, lately, but for all the wrong reasons (Russia edges closer to war as new arms arrive on Ukraine’s border). However, the people do drink wine, as well, which is what I will write about here.

The Russians do make their own stuff, mostly in the North Caucasus region (the very south-west of the country). Oddly, they do also seem to want to call their sparkling wine “champagne”, even when they make it themselves, rather than the French doing it (Only wines made in Russia can be called champagne under new Putin law).

As well as drinking their own wine themselves, they do export some of it. Indeed, in 2020 this amounted to 5.1 million liters or US$9.9 million (according to the UN Comtrade: International Trade Statistics database). It went to neighboring countries like the Ukraine (2.8 million liters, or 55%), China (12.5%), Georgia (11.5%), Kazakhstan (7.5%), Belarus (6.5%), Moldova (3%), Latvia (2%), and Kyrgyzstan (1%). This is why most of you have never tasted any of it.

However, their climate is not the best for growing grapes (not yet, anyway), and so they do import quite a bit of wine. The AAWE recently listed the top 20 sources of import for 2019 (sourcing their data from Comtrade), which accounted for 93% of the total import volume (657 million liters) and 94% of the total value (US$1.15 billion). Most of the wine comes from only a few places, with the Big Four countries accounting for 68% of the volume and 74% of the value.

I have plotted the data in the graph, where the horizontal axis shows the volume (note the logarithmic scale), the vertical axis shows the price per liter, and each point represents one of the 20 import countries. The pink line represents the average total value (ie. volume x price) — those countries to the right of this line contributed more than the average value across all countries. So, the vast majority of the wine value comes from Italy (IT), France (FR), Spain (ES) and Georgia (GE).

Note that there is more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. For example, Spain (ES) provides the largest volume, but at a very low price point, whereas France (FR) provides only 40% of that volume, but at 2.5 times the price — this results in roughly the same total value of wine imported from each of the two countries.

Uzbekistan (UZ) and Moldova (MD) provide the cheapest wine, while New Zealand (NZ) and Austria (AT) provide the most expensive stuff. The USA (US) and Australia (AU) provide less wine than New Zealand but more than Austria, and at a cheaper price point. Chile (CL), Portugal (PT) and South Africa (ZA) follow most of the Big Four countries in price, but with considerably less volumes.

Russia is the 9th most populous country on the planet, with c. 40% of the population of the USA; so this is potentially a large export market for the wine industry. It may be a better bet than the other large countries (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh), which are not known as big wine consumers. * Unfortunately, Russia may not be politically or economically any more reliable than China has turned out to be, as a trading partner. Nevertheless, it may be worth a quick look by the Australians, given their loss of the China market (China slams Australian wine with 218% tariffs for 5 years).

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* The USA is the third most populous country, after China and India. There has been a continuous rise in per person wine consumption in the USA from the end of Prohibition, finally resulting in the US taking the global lead in total wine consumption from the year 2010 onward (The rise of the USA as the world's biggest wine consumer ).

Why we are never going to know whether wine is good for us, or not

There has been ongoing debate about whether consumption of wine has any health benefits, of any sort (summarized in: Debating the health benefits of wine: an update). This discussion occurs because one group of people says “yes” and the next group says “no”, and the third group says “sometimes”. Given this situation, we can all see that the discussion will likely continue, because it looks like we are just being given a bunch of opinions. This is annoying, because it would be nice to know.

Well, we are being given opinions. Many of these opinions are actually based on real data, in the sense that there is evidence for each opinion; but others are just wishful thinking, presumably based on some bias in the opinion-giver. In the latter group are those who say: “I like wine, therefore it is good for me, in that sense.” This particular opinion is hard to argue against!

However, what I am going to write about here is the other part, where people point at some evidence in favor of their opinion. That is, they invoke medical science in support of what they are claiming. I am in favor of them doing this, for the simple reason that my professional expertise over the past 40 years has been biological science (and human beings, in spite of their claim to have a soul, quite definitely live in biological bodies).

Indeed, I used to teach university courses in biomedical experimentation — the theoretical and practical aspects of doing experiments on people.* This is important here, because experiments are where the evidence usually comes from. Opinions are fine on their own, but it is the experiment that tries to provide convincing support for the opinions. Below, I discuss some of the things that I used to teach my students — and you will see why the title of this blog post is emphatically true.

There are two issues to get clear right at the start. Evidence comes from an experiment of some sort, conducted by someone calling themselves a scientist (in this case, a biomedical scientist). We need the professional scientist because doing good experiments takes expertise. The first issue is that the experiment might not actually provide convincing evidence, in spite of good intentions The second is that it might never be possible to conduct such an experiment, in practice. Both issues apply here.

Thus, there are two basic reasons for reaching the conclusion in the title:

1. a living organism is a complex thing, and what is good for one bit of the body may not be good for any other bit;
2. no-one is ever going to be able to do a proper experiment to find out which bits are which, for human beings.

Complexity

It may seem trite to say that living organisms are complex, but it is worth emphasizing here, anyway. As the physicist Craig Bohren once noted:

The success of physics has been obtained by applying extremely complicated methods to extremely simple systems ... The electrons in copper may describe complicated trajectories but this complexity pales in comparison with that of an earthworm.

So, this is the rub — biological scientists have taken on an enormous task, because they are studying what makes some things alive and others not. Living organisms are only alive when their whole bodies function as integrated entities. If even one tiny little bit fails, the organism may die (and biology then becomes physics!). Over the past few million years, we have learned an awful lot about how to keep particular organisms alive. We started off as hunters & gatherers, simply using whatever was alive around us. Then we developed agriculture to produce our food, and medicine to prolong our lives, thus manipulating all facets of the difference between life and death.

I don’t need to bore you with this long and involved process, but the main thing we learned is just how complex it is being alive; and, remember, we ourselves are among the most physically complicated of living beings. What is good for our hearts may be bad for our livers; and what is good for our livers may be bad for our kidneys. What is good for our minds may be bad for our hearts; and so on. We have all seen this, from the moment we were born. So, there is no practical possibility of alcohol being "good for us" in any general way — we need to specify which way we are talking about, first. This is what all biomedical scientists do, before they start their experiments — they decide which (few) bits of the complexity they will study this time.

So, any summary of the potential health benefits of wine needs to occur within this context. We cannot take any one organ on its own, and discuss the affects of alcohol on it alone, in isolation from the rest of the body. Yet, this is exactly what has been happening for the study of alcohol, to date — by necessity. Think carefully about any of the media reports you have read, and ask yourself: “Which organ are they discussing, on its own?”

William “Rusty” Gaffney has recently provided an excellent summary of the current state of knowledge (Debating the health benefits of wine: an update). He has the graphs and diagrams to make it all seem as simple as he can. But that is the problem — it ain’t simple, and never will be. I see this as a big part of the beauty of biology; but you may simply find it annoying, in your everyday.

Anyway, don’t expect a definitive answer about health benefits any time soon. There are 7.5 thousand million of us, and we are all different in one way or another (even identical twins). The effect of wine on each of us will differ in some way, however small. More importantly, even within our own bodies the affect will differ between organs. To stay alive (and enjoy life) requires us to balance the different effects; and we don’t yet know enough to do that balancing act, even approximately.

Experiments

However, let’s assume for a moment that the complexity cannot defeat us, and we are determined to find out (as all biologists are). Could we ever do a convincing experiment? That is, one that provides a pretty definitive answer to our questions about health. The answer is “no”, although that does not stop us from learning a helluva lot, anyway.

Let’s look at the practical reason for experimental failure. I used to emphasize two types of experiments to my students, only one of which provides definitive evidence. The other type of experiment provides a lot of knowledge, but in this case doubt cannot be eliminated.

The ideal experiment is what I called “manipulative”. We take a group of organisms and split it into subgroups. Each subgroup is subjected to a different experimental treatment, of some sort; and we follow the subsequent outcome, for as along as necessary. So, we deliberately manipulate the circumstances of the experiment, to investigate precisely the things we want to study, while leaving everything else the same.

This is what has been done for the current crop of vaccines, for example. A group of people volunteered to take part — you might think they are crazy, but someone has to do it, for the benefit of the rest of us. One sub-group of people were given the new vaccine, and the other sub-group were given a placebo injection (usually a salt solution) — the people are not allowed to know which experimental sub-group they are in. Both groups were then given a bit of the SARS-CoV-2 virus genome, to see whether they developed the Covid-19 disease. Normally, such an experiment (called a Phase III Trial) would be followed for 2 years; but obviously we could not wait that long in the current pandemic, before deciding that the vaccinated sub-group did better than the unvaccinated one.

The alternative type of experiment is what I called “descriptive” (or perhaps “observational”). Here, we simply follow a group of organisms through time, and use the fact that they are all different from each other to explore how they react to subsequent circumstances.

For example, in what is called a Case-Control experiment, we follow two groups of people, one of whom has a disease and one of whom hasn’t got it — any difference in the subsequent outcomes for the two groups provides us with information about having the disease. In practice, this is often the best sort of experiment that we can do on humans, because people who are prepared to take part in manipulative experiments are a bit thin on the ground.

Another example is what is called a Cohort experiment, in which we follow a single (usually large) group of people through time, to see what happens. Some of them will eventually develop a certain disease, for example, and some will not; and we can look at what sorts of people they are — what characteristics seem to pre-dispose those people to develop that particular disease. This is what has been done for the study of the benefits of the so-called Mediterranean diet, for instance. However, as we say: correlation ≠ causation, and so we do not have definitive evidence of anything actually causing anything else. However, this is far and away the most common sort of experiment that we can ethically do with human beings.

Needless, to say, almost all of the experimentation done on people, as regards the affect of alcohol, have been Cohort experiments. We follow people through time — some of them drink a lot of alcohol, some of them drink less, and some of them don't drink it at all. We then see how they turn out later in life, medically speaking. If some of them develop particular problems (heart disease, kidney failure, high blood pressure, diabetes, etc), then we can compare this to their lifestyle during the study period. We can also see which ones live longer than average (which is a better outcome).

We learn a lot from doing these descriptive experiments, but we will never get a definitive answer to whether there are health benefits to imbibing wine, or what exactly these benefits might be.

Note, as a final point, that I have not gone into the issue of where we might get these groups of people that we study, in any type of experiment. We need to address all sorts of potential sample biases, including gender, age, genetic background, cultural and socioeconomic history, etc. This is quite a topic on its own.

Conclusion

We may well be interested in knowing whether wine consumption is good or bad for us, in some amount. However, we will never actually know. The study system is very complex, and hard to study. Therefore, as Rusty Gaffney notes in his blog post: “There have been no well-executed, randomized, double-blinded, intervention trials controlled for all confounding variables.” That is, there are no manipulative experiments on complex systems.

Nevertheless, we can continue to gather evidence, and we should definitely do so. The more we know, the better will be our decisions about what to do in life. However, we will never have definitive knowledge about alcohol, and its affects on human bodies. For humans, there is always “too little” and always “too much” of everything, even for essential things like air, water and food, let alone optionals like wine. We need to live in between the upper and lower limits, and each of us has to make our own decisions about where the optimal middle might be located.

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* There was an introductory course for the undergraduates in biological and biomedical sciences, and an advanced course for the postgraduate (research) students. I mention this as my attempt to provide evidence for the worth of my opinions!

Wine scores and Top 100 lists

I have noted before that Quality scores changed the wine industry, and created confusion. The fundamental characteristic of quality scores is that they are an opinion, and yet they often get treated as a piece of mathematics. Until this issue is resolved (which it may never be), confusion will continue (along with lots of discussion), which cannot be good for the wine industry; or, indeed, any other industry that asks people to score their customer experience (movies, accommodation, etc).

In normal human language, opinions are usually expressed using some sort of adjectives (good, acidic, watery, sweet, etc), but wine scores express the opinion as a number. In one sense, this can help make the opinion clear (a 95-point wine is claimed to be better, in some sense, than a 90-point wine). However, contradicting this is the tendency to treat a number as having a strict mathematical property. This makes little obvious sense, because opinions, and adjectives, are not mathematical.

In a blog post (The fundamental problem with wine scores) I noted this issue explicitly: the single wine-quality number is trying to do too many things all at once (formally: wine scores represent multidimensional properties that have been summarized as a single point in one dimension). With words, we can describe anything we want to, because we can use as many words as we need; but a wine-quality score is one number only.

This issue becomes obvious when we try to compare wine-quality scores across different wine types or terroirs, and, especially, between different tasters (see The sources of wine quality-score variation). The basic issue is that we cannot tell what any numerical similarity or difference of scores actually means (Why comparing wine-quality scores might make no sense). In particular, it is not obvious what calculating an average of quality scores might actually mean, although some well-known web sites do this regularly; and it was also done for the infamous Judgment of Paris (see: A mathematical analysis of the Judgment of Paris).

We would all, I presume, prefer it if any one commentator, or set of commentators from a single publication, is consistent. If this is so, then we could at least search for value-for-money wines by comparing scores to prices (The relationship of price to wine-quality scores). This is possibly the most valuable use of a wine score!

However, one thing that still needs addressing is the combining of wine-quality scores to produce a "best of" list. The fact that the scores are numbers does not mean that you can simply pool them from various sources. Indeed, as I have noted, the annual Wine Spectator Top-100 lists from 1988 to 2019 showed considerable variation through time.

To emphasize this point, we can look at the recent Top 100 Wines of 2021 from James Suckling and his colleagues. This is not simply a compilation of the best–scoring wines from this year, based on the 11 individual Top-100 lists from that year (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Chile, China, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, USA). Such a thing would not be very useful, on its own — this would be an aggregation of numbers, not a synthesis of opinions.

In this case, there are at least nine opinions to be synthesized: “Tasting team members James Suckling, Claire Nesbitt and Kevin Davy held down the fort in Hong Kong, while Jo Cooke, Stuart Pigott, Zekun Shuai, William McIlhenny, Nathan Slone and Nick Stock tasted and rated thousands of more bottles on the road in Europe and the United States as well as South Australia and China.”

James notes that: “The main criteria that went into selecting this year’s list of the best 100 wines of the world was quality ... Then we looked at pricing, and finally what we call the ‘wow’ factor. The latter are wines that excite us emotionally as well as technically as tasters.” The graph below lists all of the 100 wines in rank order, horizontally, with their assigned score shown by the vertical bar (one bar per wine).

As you can see, the Top 100 wines all scored between 98 and 100 points. However, you will note that even scoring 98 could still get a wine into the top 20 (the best of them is ranked 20th). Moreover, scoring 100 did not even guarantee that a wine got into the top 60 (the last is 63rd). Indeed, according to the website, there were 38 100-point wines (of the almost 25,000 wines tasted), but only 25 made it into the Top 100 (some of the others had only a small production, and were thus disqualified). Top scoring is apparently a tricky business for a wine (see: How many 100-point scores do critics really give?).

So, some wine commentators really do know that there is more to wine-quality assessment than simply giving the wine a number. Indeed, Robert Parker, who was heavily involved in popularizing the scoring of wine, actually did note, way back in 1989 in the Wine Times: “[My] scoring system was always meant to be an accessory to the written reviews, tasting notes. That’s why I use sentences and try and make it interesting ... There’s a certain segment of my readers who only look at numbers, but I think it is a much smaller segment than most wine writers would like to believe.” I am not quite so sure about that last bit, which is why I have written this blog post.

Alternatively, James Halliday, from Australia, once commented: “Points are as subjective as the words in the tasting notes, but are a separate way of expressing the taster’s opinion, to be assimilated along with the description of the wine in the context of the particular tasting. All this may frustrate some consumers, but the ultimate reality is that Australia can never make Champagne, a Burgundy or a Bordeaux, so direct points comparison is fraught with contradictions and qualifications.”

We should not, of course, conclude from this that points are pointless. But we might conclude that the sometimes-heard argument that numbers are more precise than words is not really relevant in the case of assessments of wine quality. There is more to wine than can be expressed by a number; and, moreover, there are other ways to express quality (see: If not scores or words to describe wine quality, then what?).

By the way, how many of you know that Jancis Robinson has a degree in mathematics (and philosophy) from the University of Oxford? More to the point, how many wine scores have you ever seen from her? This should make you pause, and think.

The pandemic will not be over for a while yet

For the wine industry, the current pandemic has had serious financial consequences since February 2020; and these consequences are on-going even now, in December 2021. Well, the pandemic is not going to go away any time soon. So, as a biologist, I thought that I might try to clear up a whole series of issues that the general media seem to often get wrong. There is no further mention of wine in this post; but you will learn a lot, anyway.

Pandemics

A pandemic is an epidemic that affects whole continents. An epidemic, in turn, involves the wide spreading of some disease-causing pathogen (eg. virus, bacterium, fungus, apicomplexan). In each epidemic, the pathogen spreads easily among a large number of people (or other animals, and plants), causing them to develop a particular disease; and it may well cause a considerable number of deaths.

Medically, "situation normal" for diseases involves elderly people, because they can easily succumb to many diseases (ie. their personal immune system has become weakened). For example, every year, elderly people are encouraged to take a "flu shot" (a vaccine; see below) to help them cope with whatever the current widespread influenza virus happens to be. An epidemic (which is unusual, by comparison) therefore occurs when younger people are affected, as well as the elderly.

The current pandemic thus initially surprised the medical people (and the government authorities) when it started out principally affecting older people. Epidemics do not normally start like that, being common principally among older people. Sadly, a lot of old people died early on, before the authorities realized that this group needed special protection.

They are not the only risk group, however. Males are much more likely to get sick (and die) than are females, for example, along with people who have high blood pressure, or Type-II diabetes. Have a guess who is old and male, with family-inherited high blood pressure and Type-II diabetes? Sometimes, I think that it is not safe for me to leave the house!

SARS versus Covid

SARS-CoV-2 is a virus, a foreign piece of genome that can get inside living organisms (the hosts), and proliferate there. Covid-19 is a disease, which is the host body's reaction to that foreign genome. I would say that confounding these two things is the single most common mistake made by the media. They say that something, like a mouse or a hippo is, "infected with covid" when they mean "infected with SARS". If the infected mouse does not react to the virus, then it does not have Covid-19, even though it has (and can transmit) the virus. This confusion cannot help the general public to understand what is going on.

So, Covid is you, SARS is the virus — you get infected by the virus, and react by developing the disease. This distinction is vital to how we deal with the current pandemic (as discussed below). Some people react so well that they don't even notice that they are infected with the virus, while others get severe cold-like symptoms; and many react so badly that they die (officially, 5.3 million, so far, which is 20% of the number of officially reported infections).

Our immune system is our body's defense against foreign genomes (or other bodies). Our own body can heal a cut or scratch, but in addition the immune system deals with anything foreign that enters through the damaged area (that is what the pus is doing, for example). In particular, your immune system will usually remember how to deal with every pathogen that your body has ever encountered — every cold, every bout of flu, and every vaccination. Some immune systems do better than others, though, which is why we all differ in how we react to disease-causing organisms. Importantly, your immune system may not be able to deal with any of the pathogens that you have not yet encountered.

Viruses cannot live outside the host, which makes them different from all other pathogens. Bacteria have a cell wall, for example, and can maintain a separate existence. However, a virus is not a cell — that is why we often call them "particles", not cells. They do not last all that long in the open air.

This means that a virus needs to get from one person to another pretty quickly. The easier they can do this, the more contagious they can be. Moreover, killing the host is a pretty bad move, because the virus dies along with the host. That is, the virus needs to keep the host alive, so that the host can continue to spread the virus particles to new hosts.

In this sense, an infected person who is not sick is the worst possible scenario for us, but the best one for the virus. During the course of an epidemic, new virus genomes continually appear, due to genetic mutations (viruses mutate easily) — in the current case, these variants have been called Delta and Omicron, and so on. Through time, these new variants are usually much more contagious than their predecessors (they spread more easily), but they are less likely to be deadly. So far, this looks to be true of the new Omicron variant: it is highly contagious but seems to cause milder symptoms — this is exactly what we would expect, based on previous pandemics.

As another example, the immediate predecessor to SARS-CoV-2 was called MERS. It was far more deadly than its own predecessor, called SARS. As a result, MERS did not spread beyond the Middle East, where it arose — it killed people before they could spread the virus particles. It thus did not cause a pandemic, and was thereby safe for the rest of us. SARS-CoV-2 is another matter entirely, compared to both SARS and MERS. Without action from us, the only way this pandemic is likely to end is to wait (who knows how long) for a variant to become predominant that does not kill at all.

Incidentally, the coronaviruses, as a group, are so problematic because they normally do not kill humans. Indeed, they are one of the causes of the common cold — about 15% of all colds are caused by coronaviruses, and so most us have been infected by one at some time or another. Colds are so common because the virus particles spread easily, but do not kill their host — the host just soldiers on, spreading the particles to new hosts. So, in one sense, SARS-CoV-2 is simply a mutant cold virus that can kill. (Note: there is no known cure for a cold — we solely treat the symptoms.)

Vaccines

Since your immune system may not be able to deal with any of the pathogens that you have not yet encountered, we usually need to do something about any new epidemic. That is where vaccination comes in — we give your body some sort of (safe) experience of the new pathogen, so that your own immune system can work out what to do about it. This vaccine* will protect you when the real thing turns up.

Think of it like a seat-belt in a car. The seat-belt does not prevent you from having an accident, but it can help tremendously with your reaction to the accident. Indeed, the seat-belt can keep you alive; and all cars are now fitted with them, by law.

Well, a vaccine is a seat-belt, nothing more. It cannot stop you from catching a virus, but it can help enormously with your reaction to the virus infection, preventing development of the disease. So, yes, it is perfectly normal for vaccinated people to get infected, although we would prefer that this does not happen. However, the vaccine should stop people from dying in response to that infection.

So, when driving a car, you still have to drive safely, even though you are wearing a seat-belt. Similarly, you still have to keep away from infected people (ie. socially distance), even though you are vaccinated. This virus is spread by aerosols, which are the finest suspensions in the air — distance is your best way not to breathe in infected air from another person. Remember, though, just like a seat-belt, a vaccine cannot guarantee to save you, although it will greatly improve your chances.

So, can you all now see why we are still having global problems? People are sick and tired of the whole affair, and want it to be over. So, they get vaccinated, and immediately try to return to a "normal" life. That is like buckling up a seat-belt and then driving without regard for the road rules. The best approach is to drive safely, even if you have filled your car with safety devices.

This is why the pandemic is not going away any time soon. You are still being subjected to infected people in your vicinity, even when you are vaccinated. The vaccine will help with your immune reaction, but not with your original action in contacting the infected person in the first place. While-ever there are infected, or potentially infectious, people on this planet, the pandemic cannot become history.

Protection thus ultimately comes from group behavior, not from the behavior of individuals — we all need to be uninfected, not just some of us (medically, this is called "herd immunity"). Your biggest danger is not the virus itself, but the people who refuse to protect themselves from it, and can thus infect you, whether they intend to or not — the virus cannot harm you if there is no-one to give it to you.

In the meantime, my wife and I still behave like we are elderly people in a pandemic that can kill us, even though we are both fully vaccinated. We still keep as far from other people as we reasonably can — for example, we visit the supermarket when it is not busy, and we prefer to attend outdoor events (like Christmas markets, at the moment).

The worst pandemic in history

Many people consider the Black Death to have been pretty bad, because a larger percentage of the known world population died, compared to any other pandemic. This was a plague epidemic, which is caused by a particular bacterium (not a virus). There have been plenty of plague epidemics in history. Indeed, the Bible is full of them — many of the catastrophes attributed to God's displeasure are now recognizable as having been plague epidemics.

However, the pandemic that killed the largest number of people occurred only a century ago, not a millennium. This was another viral epidemic, caused by an influenza virus. These are pretty common, too, often under the name "swine flu" or "bird flu". They have these names because we often share so-called H1N1 influenza viruses with pigs and birds (apparently we have a lot of physiological similarity to them!). The most recent such pandemics were in 2009, and before that in 1977. (Aside: One reason that we have dogs and cats as domestic animals is because we don't share pathogens with them — you certainly won't catch Covid-19 from them, or give it to them.)

So, one common scenario is that migrating birds spread the influenza viruses to where there are pig farms. The viruses infect the pigs; and new viral genetic variants then arise in those pigs. These new variants then get into the farmers, and they spread from there to the rest of us. The problem is that even if the new viruses do not kill the pigs, these new variants can kill us.

So, where would we look for a lot of pig farms under a major bird migration route? If I was in the USA, I would look in Kansas. So, it is of no surprise that the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918 was first detected on Kansas pig farms. (The mis-naming apparently comes from official attempts at a cover-up, trying to maintain morale in Europe at the end of World War I — the Spanish were the main ones prepared to report the epidemic, and the label has stuck.)

In Kansas, the virus spread to the nearby troop encampments, where the men were to be sent to Europe. Well, the rest follows like night follows day. A set of trans-Atlantic troop ships is an ideal place to spread a flu virus. When the infected troops turned up in Europe, what did they find? A set of field hospitals with half-dead soldiers, which is another ideal location for spread; along with a set of towns bombed to pieces, so that the homeless people were all jammed into church halls, which is another ideal location. The official figures indicate that more people died in that pandemic than died in the actual War itself (both military and civilian combined).

So, thank your lucky stars that the current pandemic has been nothing like that one. We are all having a tough time, sure, but almost all of us will live through it, this time (and without the red crosses that marked the doors housing plague victims during the Black Death). So, buckle-up and drive safely — get vaccinated, so our societies can get to herd immunity sooner rather than later. You were vaccinated against all sorts of childhood diseases, and it did you a power of good (no more polio, tetanus, hepatitis, rubella, measles, whooping cough, mumps, diphtheria, chicken pox ...) .

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* Vaccination is one of the greatest contributions ever made to medicine, and it was made by uneducated women (anti-vaxxers take note). The "old wives tale" among cow maids (tending the cows on their summer pastures) was that they did not contract chicken pox because they got cow pox, instead. That is, catching the pox virus that we share with cows (which is not deadly) prevented them from getting ill from the pox virus that we share with chickens (which is deadly, and used to be one of the most common causes of child mortality). You can imagine how the (male, highly educated) medical people responded to this claim. Still, one of them finally decided to check it out; and (blow me down) the women were right. That is why we call it vaccination ("vacca" is the Latin word for "cow") — it's the cow treatment.