U-M Medical Historian Says It Appears History Is Repeating Itself In Our Current Pandemic

Over a hundred years since the pandemic of 1918, our current public health crisis is happening in a very similar manner to what happened then... killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Lisa Barry talks with the Assistant Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, Dr. Alex Navarro, about how what's happening now compares to what happened back then.

Dr. Alex Navarro says politics and a resistance to vaccines and public health advisories are causing several surges of the virus, including in Michigan.

Dr. Navarro says the 1918 pandemic is still the single deadliest pandemic in recorded human history but adds we are currently, potentially, on track for the current COVID-19 pandemic to surpass that in the United States.

He says we needed to be even more careful then they were in 1918, and we haven’t been--at least since last spring--as careful as we should have been.