The third wave of the great 1918-1919 influenza pandemic peaked early in March of 1919. Although the third wave wasn’t as deadly as the apocalyptic second wave in mid 1918, it was much deadlier than the first wave, and hit particularly hard in several major cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Memphis, Nashville, San Francisco and St. Louis.

There’s a bitter irony, then, in the fact that on March 3, 1919, the U.S. Post Office issued a 3-cent stamp celebrating the Allies’ victory in World War I, which had ended in November 1918. That small stamp, which is today’s #stampoftheday, has some important and timely messages about what we might be doing today to mitigate the impacts of our current pandemic.

The stamp itself features the “Goddess of Liberty Victorious.” She’s holding a sword in one hand and the Scales of Justice in the other and she’s framed by the flags of the five allied countries most engaged in the conflict- Great Britain, Belgium, the U.S., Italy, and France.

There’s nothing on the stamp associated with the deadly influenza pandemic —which killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million people worldwide. That’s unfortunate because while the pandemic likely would have been devastating, for several reasons, its spread was greatly facilitated by the US’ involvement in the war.

To begin with, most historians believe that the spread of the pandemic was caused by a mutated virus spread by wartime troop movements, both within the United States but also by troops from the US heading to the war in Europe. As John Barry notes in “The Great Influenza”: the Army had quickly grown from “a few thousands of soldiers…to millions” living in huge, incomplete cantonments, each holding roughly 50,000 men from a host of different locales, which meant each soldier had different disease immunities and vulnerabilities. “Never before in American history – and possibly never before in any country’s history-had so many men been brought together in such a way.”

Moreover, in sections that are particularly striking when read now, Barry shows that much of this occurred despite the fact that leading doctors kept warning military and political leaders that this was exactly what would happen if, as President Woodrow Wilson demanded, the US devoted all of its resources to the war effort. But Wilson was not be deterred, because, Barry wrote, “he was one of those rare men who believed almost to the point of mental illness in his own righteousness.”

Barry’s also describes, often in painful detail, what it looks like when a disease overwhelms not only hospitals and medical professionals but entire communities and cities. In Philadelphia, he wrote, systems collapsed so thoroughly that dead bodies weren’t being removed from homes for several days or more.

While the disease would have taken a significant toll, Barry contends its impact might have been mitigated if policymakers and civic leaders had moved more quickly to impose restrictions and less quickly to lift them when they finally were imposed. He also makes clear that the lack of timely responses was greatly facilitated by the fact that war-time censorship and propaganda made it impossible for the press to report on the pandemic in timely and accurate ways.

Reflecting on lessons that pandemic offers for this one in a January interview on the American Medical Association’s COVID-19 Update webcast, Barry said that one key takeaway was: “you don’t manage the truth. You tell the truth.”

“If you are going to rely on people complying with public health measures…then you better pay attention to what you’re saying. If you have a mixed message, that’s not going to work. If you lie to them, they will find that out fairly quickly. And once you lose credibility, people aren’t going to pay any attention to you….The best strategy, both short and long term, in any crisis situation –…particularly…when you’re looking for public compliance with your advice— is to tell the truth and then keep telling it.”

It’s also worth noting that stamps also helped fund the war effort. In November 1917, the price of a first-class stamp increased from 2 to 3 cent, with the extra revenue going to the war effort not the Post Office. However, because the government was so busy printing war bonds and revenue stamps, the Post Office didn’t issue a new 3-cent stamp until today’s stamp was issued in March 1919, almost five months after the November armistice that had ended the war.

There’s also an odd coda to the story. On April 3, 1918, exactly a month after the stamp was issued, Wilson, who since January had been in Paris to negotiate the peace treaty that would officially end the war, became quite ill. He had a severe cough, a temperature of 103, and was bedridden for at least five days. Dr. Cary Grayson, his physician, later described the long night he spent at Wilson’s bedside as “one of the worst through which I have ever passed. I was able to control the spasms of coughing but his condition looked very serious.”

Although Grayson publicly said the president had a bad cold, most historians now believe Wilson probably had influenza. After he had recovered slightly, the exhausted Wilson gave up most of the demands that he had been pressing the French to meet, setting the stage for a treaty that Steve Coll wrote in The New Yorker last April, “proved to be a settlement so harsh and onerous to Germans that it became a provocative cause of revived German nationalism during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and, eventually, a rallying cause of Adolf Hitler.”

So at this fraught moment in the current pandemic, this more-than-100-year-old stamp celebrating the end of World War I, offers important reminders about the importance of making wise and informed decisions and the need to truthfully explain them as well.

Be well, stay safe, tell the truth and keep telling it, fight for justice, and work for peace.