The flu can kill millions. In 1918 a pandemic was fueled by World War I.
Woodrow Wilson
By mid-October  the situation had become so dire that  President Woodrow Wilson  called  his  Army chief of staff to the White House  suggesting that perhaps the troop ships should be halted until the flu abated.  He  was reassured by Gen. Peyton C. March that every medical precaution was being taken.
A year earlier   Wilson  had outlined in  his  famous 14-point speech a blueprint to keep the world safe from future wars.  He  called for an end to secret treaties and proposed a plan that would consider the rights of native people who lived in colonial territories  require reduction in world armaments and guarantee freedom of the seas.  He  also proposed the League of Nations  an international organization empowered to ensure “political independence and territorial integrity [of] great and small states alike.”
 Wilson  arrived in Paris for the peace talks prepared to battle with Georges Clemenceau  the 77-year-old “Tiger” of France  who wanted Germany to pay heavily for waging war.
The talks dragged on and turned so bitter that  Wilson  threatened to head home without an agreement. And then  he  came down with the flu.
“ The president  was suddenly taken violently sick with the influenza at a time when the whole of civilization seemed to be in the balance ”  his  doctor  Cary T. Grayson  wrote to a friend back home on April 14  1919. “From your side of the water you can not realize on what thin ice European civilization has been skating. . . . Some day perhaps I may be able to tell the world what a close call we had.”
Instead  Grayson told the public that  Wilson  had caught a cold.
 Wilson  would recover sufficiently to resume the talks. But  he  was an enfeebled shadow of  his  former self  quickly caving in to Clemenceau’s demands.
“It is of course impossible to say what  Wilson  would have done had  he  not become sick ” historian John M. Barry wrote in his best-selling book “The Great Influenza.” “Influenza did weaken  him  physically  and — precisely at the most critical point of the negotiations — influenza did at the least drain from  him  the stamina and the ability to concentrate. That much is certain. And it is almost certain that influenza affected  his  mind in other  deeper ways.”
Clemenceau’s greatest triumph — and  Wilson ’s greatest humiliation in  his  moment of weakness— was acquiescence to what became known as the “War Guilt Clause.” Germans viewed that clause as putting full responsibility for the war on Germany  and it demanded payment of a sum far greater than anything the country could afford.
 Wilson’s  Fourteen Points had been widely distributed in Germany  and Germans saw their abandonment as a betrayal. For 14 years  the Weimar Republic ruled Germany amid hyperinflation  political extremism and contentious relationships with the victorious Allies.
By mid-October  the situation had become so dire that  [TGT]called  [TGT]  Army chief of staff to the White House  suggesting that perhaps the troop ships should be halted until the flu abated.  He  was reassured by Gen. Peyton C. March that every medical precaution was being taken.
A year earlier   Wilson  had outlined in  his  famous 14-point speech a blueprint to keep the world safe from future wars.  He  called for an end to secret treaties and proposed a plan that would consider the rights of native people who lived in colonial territories  require reduction in world armaments and guarantee freedom of the seas.  He  also proposed the League of Nations  an international organization empowered to ensure “political independence and territorial integrity [of] great and small states alike.”
 Wilson  arrived in Paris for the peace talks prepared to battle with Georges Clemenceau  the 77-year-old “Tiger” of France  who wanted Germany to pay heavily for waging war.
The talks dragged on and turned so bitter that  Wilson  threatened to head home without an agreement. And then  he  came down with the flu.
“ The president  was suddenly taken violently sick with the influenza at a time when the whole of civilization seemed to be in the balance ”  his  doctor  Cary T. Grayson  wrote to a friend back home on April 14  1919. “From your side of the water you can not realize on what thin ice European civilization has been skating. . . . Some day perhaps I may be able to tell the world what a close call we had.”
Instead  Grayson told the public that  Wilson  had caught a cold.
 Wilson  would recover sufficiently to resume the talks. But  he  was an enfeebled shadow of  his  former self  quickly caving in to Clemenceau’s demands.
“It is of course impossible to say what  Wilson  would have done had  he  not become sick ” historian John M. Barry wrote in his best-selling book “The Great Influenza.” “Influenza did weaken  him  physically  and — precisely at the most critical point of the negotiations — influenza did at the least drain from  him  the stamina and the ability to concentrate. That much is certain. And it is almost certain that influenza affected  his  mind in other  deeper ways.”
Clemenceau’s greatest triumph — and  Wilson ’s greatest humiliation in  his  moment of weakness— was acquiescence to what became known as the “War Guilt Clause.” Germans viewed that clause as putting full responsibility for the war on Germany  and it demanded payment of a sum far greater than anything the country could afford.
 Wilson’s  Fourteen Points had been widely distributed in Germany  and Germans saw their abandonment as a betrayal. For 14 years  the Weimar Republic ruled Germany amid hyperinflation  political extremism and contentious relationships with the victorious Allies.