The spanish 1918 flu and the COVID-19 disease: The art of remembering and foreshadowing pandemics

Abstract

The 2020 Lasker Medical Research Awards will not be given this year, owing to the global COVID-19 pandemic. One way to help fill this void is to reflect back on the foundational discoveries in immunology, spanning more than a century, that are now guiding current basic and clinical investigations aimed at halting the SARS-CoV-2 virus and treating infected individuals. The Lasker Foundation challenged the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and physician-scientist Siddhartha Mukherjee to tell the story of the COVID-19 pandemic in an historical context centered around major advances in immunology. In the accompanying Perspective published in this issue, Mukherjee provides a vivid and lively account, told in sweeping fashion (Mukherjee, 2020).