No Flu, No Proof: Rosenau’s 1918 Challenge to Contagion

A Scrubbed Chapter of Medical History Questions the Foundations of Disease Transmission

In 1918, amid the global panic of the so-called Spanish Flu, Dr. Milton J. Rosenau’s experiments at Gallops Island, Boston, delivered a scientific rebuke to the prevailing dogma of microbial disease transmission, as detailed in this excerpt from The Final Pandemic by the Baileys. Rosenau’s team subjected healthy volunteers to extreme tests—spraying lung material from flu victims into their eyes and throats, injecting filtered mucous, and exposing them to patients’ coughs—yet not one fell ill, as noted in his 1919 report: “As a matter of fact, we entered the outbreak with a notion that we knew the cause of the disease, and were quite sure we knew how it was transmitted.” This failure to demonstrate contagion, explored in Unveiling the Illusion of Contagion, dismantles the myth of the Spanish Flu as a transmissible plague, a narrative further rebuked in Spanish Flu for its conflation with environmental factors like wartime chemical warfare stressors. Rosenau’s findings, pivotal to The Final Pandemic, expose a scrubbed medical history, where inconvenient evidence is omitted from texts like the 2013 Textbook of Influenza, signaling a systemic reluctance to confront the unproven hypothesis of human-to-human transmission.

This erasure of Rosenau’s work, as the Baileys argue, reflects a broader crisis in Virology, where assumptions of microbial causation persist despite experimental refutations. The experiments’ implications extend beyond 1918, challenging modern pandemics’ reliance on contagion narratives and inviting scrutiny of alternative disease models, such as those linking illness to electromagnetic exposures in Electricity and Disease, for example. Rosenau’s shock - “Perhaps, if we have learned anything, it is that we are not quite sure what we know about the disease” - underscores a scientific humility absent in contemporary medical discourse, which sidesteps his findings in obituaries and Wikipedia entries alike. By unearthing this scrubbed history, the excerpt from The Final Pandemic not only debunks the myths of the Spanish Flu and contagion but also prompts readers to question the foundations of infectious disease theory, setting the stage for a critical reexamination of medical science’s untested axioms.

With thanks to Drs Mark & Samantha Bailey.

The Final Pandemic – Dr Mark and Samantha Bailey

What Human-to-Human Transmission?

It is possible that medical authors such as Professor Jay Varma (chapter 2: “The Washington Post Connects no Dots”) are naive to the fact that the claimed transmission of disease via microbes has never been established in appropriately designed and controlled scientific studies. The authors can attest that during their training as doctors, the concept of such disease transmission was presented as dogma rather than demonstrated to be based in experimental evidence.

Perhaps the most spectacular failure to show transmission of a disease commonly thought to be highly contagious were the 1918 Spanish Flu experiments. These took place at Gallops Island, Boston and were conducted by the Public Health Service and the U.S. Navy under the supervision of Dr Milton Rosenau. As described by Rosenau in his summary report that was published in the The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1919:

The volunteers were all of the most susceptible age, mostly between 18 and 25, only a few of them around 30 years old; and all were in good physical condition. None of these volunteers, 100 all told in number, had "influenza;" that is, from the most careful histories that we could elicit, they gave no account of a febrile attack of any kind during the winter, except a few who were purposely selected, as having shown a typical attack of influenza, in order to test questions of immunity, and for the purpose of control.

The clinical experiments that were performed by Rosenau’s team can be summarized as follows:

1. Material was taken from the lungs of people said to be victims of the Spanish Flu and made into a liquid. This was then sprayed in large volumes into the eyes, nose, throat and lungs of the volunteers.

2. Mucous secretions were obtained from the nose, throat, and lungs of diseased individuals and around 1ml of this was placed directly into the nostrils and throats of the volunteers.

3. Part 2 was repeated, this time with 6ml, enough that some of the mucous secretions were swallowed by the volunteers.

4. Material was transferred directly from nose to nose and throat to throat with swabs.

5. Blood was taken from diseased individuals and 10ml of this was injected into some of the volunteers.

6. Mucous was obtained from sick individuals, passed through bacterial filters and then 3.5ml of the filtered fluid was injected under the skin of the volunteers.

7. Volunteers shook hands with patients in Spanish Flu wards, sat close to them for prolonged periods, breathed in their exhalations, and had their faces coughed on. They each repeated this same interaction with ten hospitalized patients in total.

And what was the result of these incredible experiments? Not one volunteer developed influenza or became ill in any way. To this day the concept of human-to-human transmission of influenza remains a hypothesis, or more accurately a refuted hypothesis given the repeated experimental failures. In what can only be described as a scientific scandal, the medical establishment remains remarkably silent and complacent on these pivotal experiments. For example, the 500-page Textbook of Influenza published in 2013 mentions “transmission” of the condition several hundred times and yet provides no evidence of a clinical study to support this claim. Even more conspicuous is the fact that Rosenau’s and other similar human studies were completely omitted from the textbook - an omission that should have been of great interest to the editors of a textbook dedicated to influenza. Equally conspicuous are the public records of Dr Rosenau. An obituary that appeared in the American Journal of Public Health in May 1946 made no mention of his crucial research into influenza. Similarly, Rosenau’s Wikipedia page makes no mention of his work with the U.S. Navy and what are some of the most important clinical experiments involving alleged contagion ever performed. The widely-held belief that influenza is a transmissible illness via a microbe can simply not be substantiated in any of the scientific publications. In 1919 it was evident that Rosenau was shocked at the results of his own experiments but unfortunately the medical community chose to ignore his profound conclusion:

As a matter of fact, we entered the outbreak with a notion that we knew the cause of the disease, and were quite sure we knew how it was transmitted from person to person. Perhaps, if we have learned anything, it is that we are not quite sure what we know about the disease.— Dr Milton J. Rosenau

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