Hey, everyone. We've got a special bonus episode for you this week.

It's about the pandemic of 1957, where one doctor risked his reputation by first predicting it

and then demanding the entire country get vaccinated months before the pandemic even hit the United

States. That man is now called the father of modern vaccines. This is a story we originally

produced back in 2018 and listening to it now feels like stepping into a time capsule

back three whole years when the Spanish flu felt like kind of a deep cut relegated to the past.

And Dr. Anthony Fauci wasn't a household name. So we wanted to share this story again.

And after this episode, we have a follow-up interview with the head doctor at the Smithsonian,

just to give us an update on what we've learned since this episode was originally published.

Oh, and I want to add, this was before my time as host of Side Door. So the host you'll hear

is the one and only the original Tony Cone. Okay, here it goes.

This is Side Door, a podcast from Smithsonian with support from PRX. I'm Tony Cone.

I always remember a quote, which was the body's piled up something fierce.

In 1918, a super deadly virus spread across the world. Alexandria Lord, the chair and a curator

of medicine and science at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History,

has spent years studying what made 1918 so deadly. When we think about bodies accumulating

and a city not able to keep up with bearing the dead, we think that's something that happened

in the Middle Ages. No, it happened in the 20th century in an industrialized nation, our nation,

but also nations across the world. In October, just October, the disease killed 196,000 people

in the U.S. alone. A year later, 675,000 people were dead. And again, that was just in the United

States. Worldwide, the body count was as high as 100 million. It was one of the most intense

pandemics that we've ever seen. So what caused the 1918 pandemic?

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