San Francisco's Fake Plague of 1900-1904

City Elders and the forerunner of the CDC created a fake plague as a way to reduce the population of Chinese via "public health measures."

On March 6, 1900, Chick Gin, a Chinese resident of San Francisco’s Chinatown was discovered dead at the basement of the Globe Hotel. (Other accounts refer to a Wong Chut King being found dead on February 7th).

Under the laws of the time, whites who died unattended would be seen by an appropriate physician or undertaker but all Chinese who died unattended were required to have an autopsy. The attending health officer, F.P. Wilson called in San Francisco’s chief health officer, A.P. O’Brien who called in the city bacteriologist Wilfred Kellogg.

Kellogg had no experience with bubonic plague - in fact, very few American physicians knew anything about the disease except the grainy photos they had seen in textbooks. Plague would not come to North America for certain until 1907 when Post-1906 earthquake damage caused a relaxation of inspections for vessels entering the Port of San Francisco. Instead, Wilson turned to “experts” by taking a sample of Chick Gin’s lymph gland to Joseph Kinyoun at the US Marine Hospital Service Laboratory on Angel Island - the “Ellis Island of the West” where thousands of Chinese coolies had passed through until the passage of Exclusion in 1882.

Kenyoun had seen plague before - in samples imported to the Staten Island Laboratory of Hygine where Kenyoun had been in charge at age 26 in the 1890’s. This was a high-level position in the fledgling US Public Health Service, so it was somewhat inexplicable that in 1899 Kenyoun received an effective demotion and was transferred to head the Marine Hospital service in San Francisco charged with inspecting incoming ships from Hawaii after that territory’s hasty annexation in the imperial 1898 Spanish-American war. Kenyoun, in an act of predictive programming, soon warned a plague epidemic festering in India for decades would soon reach San Francisco and ordered every incoming vessel to display yellow flags - much as the fear mongering over trans-pacific Cruise Ships struck in 2020. In 1898, San Francisco had gone into fear about a false report of plague - a misdiagnosis of Chinese with pneumonia.

In 1900, Kenyoun was right in place - or perhaps emplaced - to make the first examination of Chick Gin (or was it Wong King?) who had died of clinical signs of pneumonia and find a bacteria. Seek and ye shall find.

Much like in 1983, a lymph node from a French fashion designer with pneumonia named Frederic Brugiere would make its way to the Hospital Saltpetrie to Luc Montagnier who was looking for retroviruses, supernatant from Chick Gin’s lymph node made its way to Kenyoun’s hospital lab where he was looking for plague. With no control experiments, Kinyoun injected the bacteria into lab monkeys who got sick. Kinyoun would pronounce: “Aha! Chinatown’s got plague.”

Kinyoun’s announcement was made on 3/11/00 - exactly 120 years before the announcement of a ‘covid’ pandemic on 3/11/20 by the World Health Organization.

Meanwhile on March 7th, Chinatown - and only Chinatown - had already gone into lockdown. This was even before Kinyoun’s official diagnosis on 3/11. Police guards surrounded Chinatown and first removed all whites from the district before they cordoned it off (even though they presumably could have been exposed). Nobody was allowed to enter or leave. As in 2020, the lockdown made no sense. Plague was supposed to be spread by fleas infesting rats - not from human-to-human “close personal contact.” The Chinese consul stated on March 7, “it is wrong to close an extensive section like Chinatown simply upon the suspicion that a man might have died of the plague.”

Local newspapers were quick to call it a hoax. Interestingly, Dr. Anthony Fauci would study Kenyoun’s “plague” response in 2012. To dispel rumors Kenyoun was making “plague” up in order to increase his funding, his samples were sent to the Rockefeller's protege, Samuel Flexner, author of the infamous Flexner report and a die-hard eugenicist, who would convene a blue-ribbon panel of Rockefeller experts to confirm Kenyoun’s findings.

San Francisco lifted the lockdown on March 8th only for US Surgeon General (and Kinyoun’s boss) Walter Wyman instructed Kinyoun to inoculate every San Francisco Chinese resident with the experimental “Haffkine prophylactic vaccine.” Supposedly the vaccine had been “carefully tested” in India. It was safe and effective - “safe” meaning “the symptoms that result from inoculation are headache, nausea, lassitude, fever amounting to about 101, and swelling and pain” - this to reduce mortality by “one half” (in the days before randomized double blinded controlled clinical trials) and no evidence the vaccine prevented transmission. The vaccine had been tested on “volunteers” in a Bombay prison, and Wyman lied when he stated studies had been conducted on the vaccine’s efficacy. Several deaths had been reported after individuals in a Punjabi village had been inoculated. As historian Alan M. Kraut would state in 1994, San Francisco’s Chinese were “nominated as the next guinea pigs by regulatory fiat.”

The Chinese consul protested in Washington, but to no avail. On May 19th, the San Francisco health police descended onto Chinatown equipped with syringes and vials of the vaccine - made according to a recipe that had been telegraphed from Washington using “plague” bacteria cultivated from Chick Gin. The Health Police found groups of angry Chinese standing on street corners, merchants closing their shops in protest, and a general attitude of belligerence.

Surgeon General Wyman’s response was to impose vaccine passports - but only for Chinese - and (for the first time) Japanese. Strangely, vaccine passports were not needed to enter or leave Chinatown - just to enter or leave San Francisco. Vaccine passport inspection stations soon emerged at train stations, docks, and the roads at the southern end of the city (which sits on a peninsula). Anyone with slanty eyes was harassed.

Newer press reports about “plague” soon emerged. “Scientific Studies” of Plague in India and Southeast Asia suggested Plague only affected those who did not eat meat. San Francisco Health Authorities then concluded that “rice eating” rendered an individual vulnerable and therefore no-one but Asians could be vulnerable to the ravages of Plague - thus the Japanese were vulnerable, as fellow “rice eaters.” This satisfied media enquiries about why whites were allowed to leave Chinatown or why only Asians had to suffer vaccination and why Japanese were presumed to be “at risk” even though not one Japanese plague victim had been reported or would be reported.

In the mass-formation psychosis of “rice eating causes plague” nobody considered the importance of meats such as pork in the Chinese diet or that many intellectual whites were vegetarians.

At this point, there had been six official “victims” of “Plague” in San Francisco’s Chinatown - a crowded, somewhat un-hygienic, portion of San Francisco - a city where deed covenants limited residential opportunities for Chinese to a small portion of downtown. Property was owned by a cartel of “Six Companies” who charged exorbitant rent, keeping residents in poverty. Moreover opium smoking was epidemic among the Chinese community leading to a high prevalence of tuberculosis and drug-induced pneumonia, whose non-specific symptoms might confuse the American physician who had no more direct experience with “plague” than stories of the medieval “Black Death” from the history books (which should have been some clue that Whites and non-rice-eaters were indeed susceptible to that notorious disease).

The vast majority of inspected deaths in Chinatown even during the “plague” epidemic were diagnosed as tuberculosis.

On May 24th, a Chinese merchant, Wong Wai, sued Kinyoun over the vaccine. The lawyers went so far as to argue plague had not been proven to exist, that the vaccine was only good as a preventative, and that the mandate placed on Asians only was discriminatory and arbitrary. In 1886, a US Supreme Court case Yick Wo v Hopkins, actually struck down a San Francisco ordinance that targeted the Chinese community - one of the rare times in the 19th Century the Federal Courts actually enforced the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1871. The eyes of the world were on the case, as vaccine passports were now being demanded on the arrival of all San Francisco residents by the States of Texas and Colorado, the Ports of New Orleans and Sydney, and the countries of Mexico and Ecuador.

The judge, William Morrow, agreed with the plaintiffs, shooting down the vaccination ordinance on May 28th. He agreed the ordinance discriminated by race, that allowing movement within San Francisco but not out of San Francisco was illogical and arbitrary, and that the San Francisco charter nowhere gave an unelected board of health the authority to legislate without a majority popular vote.

Finding the coercive power of government to be limited by the important judicial check and balance - new pressure came from the private market. The State Board of Health, under the control of the Railroads met with Texas official W.F. Blunt who suggested the best approach was to limit the mobility of Chinese to Chinatown - and only then would Texas agree to lift its embargo on passengers from San Francisco - an embargo that could not be enforced without Railroad assent. A quarantine went into effect on May 31, 1900. In a turn of legalese the Chinatown quarantine was not race-based because it impacted an urban district: the blocks bounded by Kearny, Broadway, Stockton, and California streets.

When it was realized there were whites living within this quadrangle, the lines were redrawn to exclude them.

Stores were closed, business was halted, jobs were lost. Food shortages occurred. Sanitation conditions deteriorated. Streetcars were routed around Chinatown. A barbed fence was erected. Armed guards patrolled the entrance - much like the Warsaw ghetto.

As a consequence of the quarantine, those locked into the Chinese ghetto started getting sick.

Soon inspection was demanded of all of San Francisco’s Chinese laundries, even those outside of Chinatown. French laundries were exempt. The justification is escapees from Chinatown might be hiding in them - much like Jews hiding from the Warsaw ghetto. A Quarantine island was designated by the Federal Government - Angel Island. Thousands of “accommodations” were made to transport the anticipated plague victims delivered to the care of Federal marines operating a proto-FEMA camp. Much like the closure of the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, many Chinese were transported away - presumably they died of “plague” in a mass grave still marked on the island. Press were certainly uninvited.

And like the emptied Warsaw Ghetto, Chinatown was literally burned….but not for the first time. In January, 1900, a “rogue spark” from controlled burns in Honolulu intended to control plague “accidentally” engulfed 1/5 of the city, completely destroying Honolulu’s Chinatown. Coming a year after the Annexation of Hawaii (and extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act to that new Territory) the timing was coincidental, of course.

The idea of burning Chinatown came from San Francisco’s “progressive’ journal, the Call which had formerly called the plague a hoax. Under the editorship of Fremont Older, The Call would later expose a 1916 False Flag bombing at a “Preparedness Day” parade planned by the City’s “Law and Order” Committee of City Elders blamed on a trade unionist named Thomas Mooney in what would become the American Dreyfus Case. The fact such a secret “Law and Order” committee existed (and may still exist) with the power to control major events such as the quarantine was never considered by Older in his plague reporting. For all his progressiveness, Older was a thorough Racist. The call invited a New York Physician (because all things New York speak with authority) named George Shrady to conduct an autopsy of a Chinese body. Looking through a microscope, Shrady claimed to see the plague germ. The Call recanted its plague denialism but reassured the public that whites were not at risk and the city’s best bet in avoiding plague was to raze Chinatown.

“in no city in the civilized world is there a slum more foul or more menacing that that which now threatens us with the Asiatic plague…so long as it stands so long will there be a menace … of ever form of disease, plague, and pestilence which Asiatic filth and vice generate.” (The Call, May 31, 1900, 6).

Chinatown was, of course, in the center of the city - ready to “infect” whites (whom Shrady said were at less risk of the disease because of less “rice eating” - it did not need to make sense) - and the Center of the City was prime real-estate for redevelopment.

By June 1900, the California Dry Dock company gave permission to use its docking facilities on Mission Rock island to vacate 1500 Chinese from Chinatown (15% of the roughly 20,000 residents at the time). Mission Rock was a mosquito-infested swampland at the end of the Southern Pacific Railroad. It later became a superfund site (although today it is being turned into luxury housing even though it sits upon a toxic waste dump). Local news reports started to speak openly of “deportation.”

Seeing the true plan of the “plague measures” to confiscate their monopoly on Chinese housing, and hand Chinatown over to whites, the Chinese Six Companies property cartel filed suit in federal court. Prime evidence was the sawtoothing of the quarantine’s borders so that it excluded whites, proving the quarantine was targeting a race and not an urban district. The Companies pointed out the quarantine covered entire blocks where not one case of plague had been diagnosed. The Companies also noted that there was no attempt to actually quarantine those houses where plague had actually been said to occur, meaning those uninfected were not being protected.

On June 15th, Judge Morrow sided with the Chinese, ordering the quarantine/lockdown to be lifted, reasoning it was based on discrimination and not public health. He did allow the Board of Health to quarantine those houses where plague had actually been said to be found - isolating those actually exposed within the classical meaning of “quarantine.”

This was the last time the Board of Health took bold policies to supposedly control Chinese - although calls to raze Chinatown as a vector of disease persisted for years.

Only in 1904 was Chinatown declared safe from plague. In the intervening years, Health Officers turned to a war of attrition in the name of sanitation regulations against residents. The first step was a house-to-house inspection by medical investigators, initiated even before the quarantine. On May 15th, four ‘cases’ were rapidly diagnosed (using clinical criteria that could not distinguish between ‘plague’ and tuberculosis - much like TB is often diagnosed as ‘AIDS’ in Africa under the Bangui criteria). These cases were elderly immobile residents cared for by family members. Inspection, disinfection, eviction, and deportation became a slow ever-moving process. Chinatown would become “invested by decades of public health iconography with the character of a discrete and undifferentiated hub of disease.”

By 1901, President McKinley, at the urging of California Governor Henry Gage, sanctioned the Treasury Dept to commission a team of leading bacteriologists to investigate the situation in Chinatown. Lead by the infamous Simon Flexner, the team established their laboratory by January 1901. The preceded to examine the bodies of thirteen dead Chinese and by March 2 confirmed six cases of plague with a tentative seventh and three reported by the board of health - for a total of ten “confirmed” cases for the entire year-long “outbreak.”

The team concluded Chinatown needed “cleansing.”

Such ethnic cleansing was carried out through an agreement between the Dept. of Health, the State of California to assemble a corps of physicians and assistants of the Marine Hospital Service (forerunner of the CDC). All Chinese residents were to be inspected. Cases were contact-traced, workers emptied buildings of belongings of “contacts” - burning all personal property for those suspected of having been in contact with the rare victim. Residents were fumigated, hosed down, and chemically purged with all furniture destroyed. The work was considered complete by June 21, 1901: 1,180 houses and 14,117 rooms had been “disinfected” as a result of only 34 cases diagnosed between March and June from the mandatory physical exams (about 45% of Chinatown’s population having lost all their possessions).

Still 16 more “cases” would be found between July and November 1901 prompting another round of “cleansing.” New to the arsenal of cleansers was HgCl2, or mercuric chloride - a neurotoxin and heavy metal sprayed lavishly over the streets and on the floors of closets and bedrooms. How much background mercury contamination in Chinatown exists today is anyone’s guess. All structures disinfected in this way were uninhabitable for years after this treatment. How many individuals were displaced in this way is anyone’s guess.

By March 1903 still more cases were identified, and Kinyoun decided parts of Chinatown needed to be demolished - now to control rats. The work begain on March 30 when a gang of men descended upon Chinatown with axes and knocked down balconies enclosing closets and kitchens in the rear buildings. On April 5th the Board of Health condemned twenty-six structures - usually add on frame structures in the backyards of Chinatown buildings intended to add bedrooms. These were destroyed by May 15th. Donald Currie, the supervising physician, soon devised a “new inspection system” of intensive surveillance: health officials spied on families, keeping journals of the habits of building occupants, deprived of all privacy rights.

Between March and October 1903 an additional 160 buildings in Chinatown were destroyed and 70 houses vacated. By 1904 when Chinatown was declared free of plague by Rupert Blue, an assistant surgeon in the US Marine Hospital Service reporting to Kinyoun, an additional 200 buildings vacated or destroyed with tens of thousands more rooms disinfected - displacing thousands of families without compensation - as much as a quarter of the district’s residents. Health officials showed no compassion for the hardships they imposed, and because each health order hurt only a small number of residents, fewer large backlashes were encountered. Officials had found a successful formula for “cleansing.”

Afterword - Rice Eating in the Year of the Rat

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. When “Corona” first came out in 2020 and things did not add up, having known this history, I immediately realized Corona was not about disease. This playbook has a long history.

Even today, histories of the San Francisco Plague usually read something like: the response was racist, but the locals were still plague deniers and the Feds saved the day. These histories invariably side with the “experts.” Nobody steps back and asks whether the plague was indeed real. In the end, only 100 plague deaths were recorded by 1905.

Throughout the Chinatown plague “outbreak” cases of tuberculosis vastly outnumbered cases of “plague.” I put “plague” in quotes because clinical descriptions from the time are limited and it’s unclear whether there was a “plague” or simply a reclassification of tuberculosis backed with naive physicians. There is the very real possibility the 1901 “plague” epidemic was, in-fact, a racist conspiracy of city elders allied with health professionals to use public-health pretext as a means of population control.

Bubonic Plague had been unknown in North America prior to this supposed epidemic, but a very real plague outbreak occurred for the first time in 1907 in San Francisco, introducing the bacteria to the continent. Strangely, that plague epidemic occurred in every neighborhood except Chinatown. Health officials explained this away as caused by the disinfectant measures taken between 1901 and 1904 but ignored the obvious - Chinatown was destroyed in the San Francisco fire.

As residents returned to the rubble in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, they returned to the land they owned and established earthquake shacks and tents. The Chinatown camp was especially packed, and with food scarce, dietary and sanitation habits changed citywide.

Standard textbooks tell us that plague is carried by bacteria on fleas that infest rats and that the way to control plague in urban areas is to control rats and separate them from human dwellings. Having lived in a 1907 Edwardian in San Francisco in a neighborhood affected by the 1907 plague, I can attest rats would occasionally come up through the under-basement and were difficult to control. The 1907 plague did not come with the associated health measures imposed on Chinatown, and in this plague there were 160 cases and 78 deaths. Hardly the “outbreak” that engulfed the Far East.

So, when plague actually came to San Francisco, a reasonable explanation why it did not hit “rice eaters” might be ethnic practices toward sanitation and rat control. Then again, health officals were quick to blame Corona in 2020 on “batsoup in a Chinese wet market.”