Pete Hegseth gave the flu virus a stirring lecture about freedom, and the flu virus responded by infecting hundreds of recruits at Lackland Air Force Base.
This was not an unknowable mystery. Basic training is basically a respiratory virus theme park: recruits sleep close together, train close together, shower close together, and spend weeks exhausted in a giant human cough terrarium. ABC first reported at least 159 cases last week; Daily Beast reported 222; the San Antonio Express-News now reports 275 confirmed cases.
The numbers are getting worse by the day. As of Tuesday, at least 222 recruits at Lackland Air Force Base had been diagnosed with flu, and four had been hospitalized, two sources familiar with the matter told the network. That is up from 159 cases and two hospitalizations a week earlier.
One recruit has died. Keon McDaniel was in his sixth week of basic training when he suffered a medical emergency on June 12 and was rushed to Brooke Army Medical Center, where he died on June 16, according to the Air Force. The cause remains under investigation. It is not yet clear whether the death is linked to the outbreak.
The funniest and most horrible part is that the military already knew this. A certain General George Washington ordered the Continental Army to be mass-inoculated against smallpox in 1777. This was not some new woke epidemiology cooked up in a DEI lab by Dr. Fauci’s pronouns. Armies inoculate and vaccinate people because armies are made of people packed together in places where disease can wreck readiness faster than an enemy. Hegseth decided to turn 250 years of military medicine into a Fox News monologue, and the flu decided to answer in kind.
Germs do not care if your policy polls well in the dumbest group chat in America.
Hmmm. Deliberately impairing the effectiveness of military forces and getting members of the military killed during active hostilities. Thee are some names for that.
And the kind of innoculation Washington was requiring was actually fairly dangerous by modern standards.