Statewide Iowa — Items sitting on a work table in the vault at the State Historical Museum may help future generations learn about the pandemic.
Museum curator Leo Landis.
Landis says museum staff who put together a World War I exhibit in 2016 realized at the start of the pandemic they needed to start a collection. That’s because more than 700 soldiers at Camp Dodge died of the Spanish Flu in 1918, but there’s little in vault to visually illustrate what happened.
Landis says the Humboldt County Hospital has donated materials, including personal protective equipment, and the University of Iowa has provided a vial of each of the three vaccines. Landis says that was a priority, because the museum vault does not have a vial of the groundbreaking polio vaccine.
The COVID vaccine vials sitting in the museum’s vault may, in the future, help illustrate the story of the University of Iowa’s participation in the large scale, international clinical trial of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.
