There was terror afoot in 1918, real terror. The randomness of death brought that terror home. So did its speed. And so did the fact that the healthiest and strongest seemed the most vulnerable. But as horrific as the disease itself was, public officials and the media helped create that terror—not by exaggerating the disease but by minimizing it, by trying to reassure. A specialty among public relations consultants has evolved in recent decades called “risk communication.” I don’t much care for the term. For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it’s that governments need to tell the
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