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The course of the 1918 flu epidemic was profoundly influenced by the fact that it coincided with the final year of World War I. Thus, for instance, in the summer of 1918 when European ships began arriving in New York City carrying passengers stricken with the new virulent strain of flu, the port health officer, Dr. Leland Cofer, flatly ruled out the possibility of slowing down the harbor’s wartime traffic by holding incoming ships in quarantine. Instead—as is explained in the newspaper interview below—he sent any obviously sick passengers to local hospitals, and released everyone else. A few days after this interview, Cofer’s approach was warmly endorsed by Colonel J. M. Kennedy, the army’s chief medical officer at the port, who explained, “We can’t stop this war on account of Spanish or any other kind of influenza.” ¹