User:Lovewhatyoudo/s10

US response to the Spanish flu, 1918 This second draft is entirely a direct rewrite of (a US medical professor's account presented at the Institute of Medicine), supplemented by  (himself a chair of advisors of a UK health agency). All your concerns in the renditioning are direct wording from these two professionals. I overhaul the footnotes for everyone interested to check out the quotes. When multiple citations are offered for the same sentence, always check against first.
 * I propose the following to be added as a separated heading "United States" under a new subheading "Wartime response and censorship" under the current section "Response".
 * Chief source (US):
 * Supplementary source (UK):
 * -- love.wh  04:08, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

In Autumn 1918, during World War I, there have been calls to stop US troopships to France until the epidemic ended as the troops were getting infected during voyage. "It is impossible to state how many soldiers the ocean voyages killed, especially when one tries to count those infected aboard ship who died later on shore," however, the call to stop the shipment failed upon the repeated objection of Peyton March, the US Army Chief of Staff, against the urge of acting army surgeon general Charles Richard and against the concern of President Woodrow Wilson.

To avoid damaging morale and the U.S. effort at her home front during World War I, local officials almost universally told half-truths or outright lies regarding the epidemic. When it first appeared, officials routinely insisted it was only ordinary influenza; as the epidemic accelerated, officials almost daily assured the public that the worst was over. The idea “fear kills more than the disease” became a slogan put forward by the authorities and the media in cities nationwide, with such views most notably uttered by John Dill Robertson, the Chicago Public Health Commissioner. The false reassurances given by the authorities and the self-censored press systematically destroyed trust, “they were assisted—not challenged—by the press, which although not censored in a technical sense cooperated fully with the government's propaganda machine” (i.e. Committee on Public Information, CPI). Few people contradicted the official line on epidemic control, with a prominent reason being the rigid control imposed by the CPI and the newly passed Sedition Act of 1918, which punished up to 20 years in jail if one “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States”.