In 1918, Dr Andrew Garvie arrived at a one room cottage in Halifax to treat a woman suffering from the potentially deadly Spanish flu. The room was stiflingly hot and stuffy as he tended his patient. She had severe bronchial symptoms, and one of her two children was also ill.
The room was so stuffy because the only window was enclosed in a frame and would not open. Dr Garvie’s prescription – smash the window, which he did with a rolling pin.
The next day the woman and her first child were much improved, and the other child did not become sick.
Dr Garvie was on the front line battling the Spanish flu epidemics in 1918 and 1919 and he meticulously tracked the movement and severity of the virus through six regions of Halifax. His data, compiled from over a thousand cases, revealed a mystery in the way the virus spread, a mystery that suggests something is wrong with our understanding of the way flu-like viruses like influenza, Covid or common colds spread. There’s a hole in the germ theory.
“Curious Phenomenon”
In an article Dr Garvie wrote for the British Medical Journal in October 1919, he described what he called a ‘curious phenomenon’. The flu seemed to spread in two different ways which he called sporadic or household waves. The sporadic illnesses were caught by workers outside the home. They tended not to have severe symptoms and frequently did not infect other members of the household. Surrounding households were also not infected.
However, the mystery was the household wave. Garvie noted that the flu moved in slow infectious waves through households, with a number of houses in the same street becoming infected simultaneously. In Halifax, the virus spread from Claremount Road to Range Bank, to Haley Hill and Woodside. The flu seems to have then taken a break for the New Year before hitting Boothtown in January.
By comparing his data to wind and fog data, Garvie suggested that windy conditions seem to prevent the virus spreading. The virus appeared to thrive when the weather was still. This seemed to explain why the flu had taken so long to move from the Haley Hill to the Boothtown areas of Halifax – there had been a blast of windy weather. Garvie told all his patients to open windows and front and back doors to allow air currants to blow through the rooms. He also smashed the odd recalcitrant window with a rolling pin.
In these household waves the illnesses were often much more severe and more likely to lead to serious complications than in sporadic cases. All the deaths that occurred happened in these household waves.
Garvie thought it unlikely the household waves were caused by infectious neighbours popping in on one another. The newspapers were filled with frightening articles about the epidemic and people were afraid, shunning households they thought might be infected.
Although places of entertainment still operated, and people mixed freely at work and at school, Garvie though this was not the source of the spread. If it were, the infections would appear in different locations simultaneously, but they didn’t, they appeared in clumps of households. Garvie commented:
‘…why people within small radii of one another, of all ages, of different occupations, not coming in contact with one another, should develop synchronous attacks, still remains a mystery to me.’[i]
Catch me if you Can
Garvie’s observations are in line with a number of other similar cases that seem to suggest that the germ theory of viral transmission is not the whole story. For example, in a 1950 experiment twelve volunteers were left in isolation for ten weeks on a deserted Scottish island before six individuals with colds were introduced to the company. Despite all living together in close proximity, none of the original volunteers became ill.[ii]
In 1969 eight out of a twelve-man team in a remote Antarctic workstation came down with colds despite having been isolated for seventeen weeks. No viruses were found in various samples taken from the team.[iii]
In the 70s and 80s Professor Eliot Dick mixed healthy people and those with colds in dormitories for 36 hours. They were instructed to play cards, talk loudly and give each other lingering snotty kisses. Only 8 or 9 per cent of the healthy volunteers became ill.
More recently, in 2020 all but four fishermen on an Argentinian trawler caught Covid despite being at sea with no human contact for 35 days. All had quarantined in a hotel two weeks prior to departure and tested negative before joining the boat. Authorities were at a loss to explain.[iv]
Do colds, flus and coronavirus waft around the globe in great miasmas? Do they hide away in the environment waiting to pounce? Or are they lurking dormant inside us ready to be triggered? Who knows, but the standard germ theory of one-to-one transmission of these viruses seems to be ready for a paradigm shift.[v]
Ludicrous
In his article, Garvie condemned as ludicrous proposals such as wearing masks – even if masks worked, they’d have to be worn all the time at home as that’s where most serious infections occurred. He also argued that lockdowns (as we would call them now) would be similarly ridiculous. As the virus seemed to spread in household clumps, this would lead to increased congestion in overcrowded slums thus facilitating the spread. He was also aware to the class bias of lockdown policies:
“That which may be good advice to a community where a high standard of living obtains may be detrimental where the standard of living is low.”
Subsequent experience with Covid has proved Garvie’s instincts correct. Lockdowns didn’t stop the virus. Masks didn’t stop the virus.[vi] Even vaccines – that which must never be questioned – didn’t stop the virus. All these measures did was show that technocratic totalitarianism – rule by experts that must not be questioned – could be implemented with frightening ease.
We also learned that there’s one thing more contagious than covid, and perhaps more dangerous: mass hysteria.
Epilogue
Back in Halifax, Garvie was impressed by the stubborn Yorkshire grit of one patient, a recently demobbed soldier who cured himself of the Spanish flu. Garvie met the man when visiting another patient. He was sitting in front of the fire and had a temperature of 103 degrees, so Garvie advised the man to go to bed. The man replied, ‘Aw mak nowt o’bed; aw’ll cure mesen.’
When Garvie returned the next day, the man was not at home, but when the doctor came back the following day the man was grinning all over his face. He told the doctor that on the first day he had gone on a five-mile walk. He awoke the next day feeling terrible and aching all over, so he then went on an eight-mile walk, stopping off at a pub and drinking fourteen gins.
‘Aw kept on callin’ and they kept on bringin’; aw got drunk but aw’m alright nah.’
[i] Garvie, A. (1919). ‘The spread of influenza in an industrial area’, British Medical Journal, 2(3069), pp.519-23. doi: 10.1136/bmj.2.3069.519.
[ii] Jennifer Ackerman (2010). Ah-Choo! The Uncommon Life of your Common Cold, (New York: Twelve) p.21
[iii] Allen, T.R. et al. (1973). ‘An outbreak of common colds at an Antarctic base after seventeen weeks of complete isolation’, Journal of Hygiene, 71(4) pp.657-67. doi: 10.1017/s0022172400022920.
[iv] Andy Gregory, ‘Coronavirus: Fishermen test positive despite spending 35 days at sea and testing negative before they left: All but four onboard trawler contract virus during weeks of isolation’, The Independent, 16 July 2020. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-argentina-fishermen-trawler-ushuaia-covid19-echizen-maru-a9621716.html
[v] https://trusttheevidence.substack.com/p/the-sars-cov-2-transmission-riddle-4ff/comments
[vi] Jefferson, T. et al. (2023). ‘Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (1), CD006207. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6.
Paul Weatherhead 