One month later... Brakes squeal, steam vents. Dr. Welch and his team are pulling
into a train station in Washington DC returning, from a grueling cross-country
inspection of military hospitals. They hope to make their report and get some rest. Instead, a soldier meets them
on the platform with new orders. Proceed immediately to Deven's. Spanish Influenza has struck the camp. [Opening theme] Eight hours later, Welch and his team
arrive in Massachusetts. They find Camp Deven's paralyzed. Patients fill each inch
of hospital space turning blue and coughing so hard they tear
their abdominal muscles They hemorrhage blood from their noses
and scream in fever delirium. In extreme cases, the disease has ripped
tiny holes in their lungs oxygen leaks out collecting beneath
the victims skin so they crackle
when nurses roll them over like the pop snap sound of rice-cereal. What is happening? All training has stopped. Recruits that aren't sick have been put
into service caring for those that are. Nearly half the camp's
medical staff is ill. Some didn't even
show symptoms, they just collapsed. These sudden onset patients
often die within 12 hours. Those that avoid that quick death are falling
to secondary pneumonia infections. The Army has arranged special trains
to take away the dead and it's already
showing up in Boston. After a marathon session
of autopsies revealing lungs
full of frothy blood, the team turns
to Welch. He's the head of the
American Medical Association and has studied rare diseases
on three continents. Shaken, Welch says, "This must be some kind of new infection or plague." Then he runs out of the room, stepping around sick men
to get to a phone. He calls his boss Army Surgeon General Gorgas. "This is going to spread." He says, "The army needs to shut down troop movements and expand hospital space now." Then he calls the Rockefeller Institute and orders
Dr. Oswald Avery to report to Devon's. Avery is a peculiar man. Like Welch, he'd shown
no interest in marriage or family. But, unlike Welch who that private clubs
and vacation in Atlantic City, Avery had no hobbies
or social life. He is a single-minded obsessive, who lives in an apartment
next to the Institute and talks
only about his work. If anybody could find
the pathogen responsible, Avery could. ... but they have so little time. Several things
need to happen, Welch reasons. They need to figure out
how the disease spreads and how to kill it. ... and whether they could do
anything to stop it. They need to identify
the pathogen, the bacteria or toxin
that caused this disease, so they could develop a serum, antitoxin, or vaccine. And that was Avery's task. Avery who had done such good work
on the pneumonia serum they tested in the summer, which might come in handy given all the secondary
pneumonia cases. But Welch and his team weren't
the only ones hunting for the pathogen. Long Island, New York. The speading Board of Health Car
fishtails down the dirt road. Inside it sits the most unusual pair
in American medicine. In the passenger seat hanging on for dear life is Dr. William Park. Behind the wheel, with her foot
firmly on the accelerator, is the labs assistant director, Dr. Anna Williams. The two seem almost polar opposites. Where Park is religious, William stouts. He's a gentleman born to high society, where she prefers driving fast cars
and riding shotgun on stunt planes. But in 25 years of collaboration, they've won fame for their work
on polio rabies and diphtheria. ... which is why they're speeding
towards an army base. If American doctors hope to produce a vaccine
or Serum to fight this new disease, They need Park and Williams. No one, not even
their rivals at Rockefeller, can produce vaccine
in the quantities Park can. If they isolate the pathogen, he can inject it into a horse, then draw the blood and extract the equine antibodies. and Park has a lot of horses. It's how they made enough diphtheria antitoxin to supply every doctor in New York free of charge. They parked the car, tie on their masks, and get to work. Within hours, they're heading
back to the city, the back seats stuffed full of throat swabs, blood samples,
and lung tissue Both teams are looking for
the same thing: Bacillus influenzae 16 years earlier, the German physician Richard Pfeiffer had identified it as the cause of influenza - a discovery so momentous that the microbe
was nicknamed "Pfeiffer's bacillus." But Pfeiffer's is difficult
to identify and isolate. A tiny error in preparation
can ruin the sample, so finding it takes time. Meanwhile, army epidemiologists
are tracking the spread of the disease. They could actually
chart it on a map, jumping from base to base
along shipping routes and rail lines. Boston. Philadelphia. New York. New Orleans. Puget Sound. The Great Lakes. Sometimes, men became
so sick in transit that they had to be carried off the ships and trains
when they reached their destinations. Their initial investigation suggests
it's severe influenza. That means it's airborne and can survive
for hours on hard surfaces. The large number
of secondary infections indicate that it suppresses
the immune system. Surgeon General Gorgas
tries to raise the alarm. He insists his superiors freeze
all transfers and stop the troop ships. At the very least, they could hold the men
in quarantine for a week before they board. The military refuses. Germany is on their last legs,
they argue. The Austrians and the Ottomans
are rumored to be drafting peace offers. This is not the time to let up
the pressure. Nothing must distract them
or the public from the war effort. They send out
the next draft registration, forcing thousands of men across the country to crowd into civic buildings to fill out paperwork. Gorgas protests. What is the point of this? The camps have stopped all training
to deal with the outbreak. These new draftees
wouldn't become fighting men, they'd just report
for duty and get flu. Finally, a win. The army agrees
and cancels the next draft. But it's too late. As Gorgas battles the generals, unit commanders are already
ignoring medical advice. At Camp Grant, a doctor sits
in the Commandant's office telling his commander that
the overcrowding situation is dangerous. He's ignoring regulations - too many men in the barracks
and on transfer trains. The Commandant answer will seal his fate. In two weeks, the doctor
will be back in this office, telling him that 500 men are dead. The last troop train they'd sent
had turned into a plague train. 1/4 of the transfers
had to be hospitalized, and the camp
had run out of coffins. Upon hearing this the Commandant, will order
the doctor out of his office... ... draw his pistol... ... and take his own life. But that is two weeks from now. At this moment, he says the overcrowding
is necessary. This is war doctor But as bad as things
are in the military, they're worse on the civilian front. The head
of the Public Health Service is in denial. He issues a useless notice
on how to avoid influenza and collects some statistics,
but does nothing more. The military worries that raising public awareness
of the flu will damage morale, and he's not a man to stand up
to the military. And he's not alone. In Boston, New York,
and Philadelphia, people are starting to collapse on
the street or fall from horseback. Hacking, shivering patients fill hospitals. Employee absenteeism hikes up but civic leaders refuse
to admit the growing crisis As Park and Williams raced
to identify the Pathogen, with half their staff ill
and some dying, the head of the New York Board of Health, a homeopath with
the no scientific training... ... denies there's an epidemic. In Philadelphia, the mayor and his health officials are telling
the press that the outbreak is nearly over. They continue doing so day after day as the death toll mounts
and hospital wards fill. The press buries flu reports in the back pages
to preserve wartime morale. After all, panicked citizens don't show up
for work at the shipyard They don't visit
their neighborhood Marine recruiter, or buy liberty loans
to fund the war effort. And that last one is important, because Philadelphia is about to throw
the largest Liberty Loan drive in the country. Soon, thousands will march through the city and hundreds of thousands will turn up to watch and chip in. Doctors urge the mayor to cancel
all public gatherings. he refuses He refuses. September 27th. There's been progress. Welch and his team at Camp Deven's
telephone their report to Gorgas. They found Pfeiffer's bacillus
in a majority of the flu cases. Park and Williams confirm
the findings in their samples. Now if they can isolate
and grow a sample of Pfeiffer's, They can begin
work on a vaccine. But Avery isn't so sure. He'd found Pfeiffer's,
but not consistently. In fact, he wonders
if something else is responsible: a virus
too small to see. If so, they could only hope
that when they produce the vaccine, the horse would make antibodies
for this virus as well. It was the best they could do. After making his report,
Welch boards a train to DC. It had been
a period of exhausting, dangerous work. He feels bone tired, and has a headache. The symptoms start
to show on the train ride. He switches his ticket and gets a room
at his favorite hotel in Atlantic City. He'll remain there, delirious, in self-imposed quarantine for weeks. The most respected man
in American medicine is out of action, right when the country
needs him most. Because America was about to run out of coffins [Ending theme]
