The Spanish Flu did indeed have a socio-political impact in a lot of countries. It'll come as no surprise that the flu disproportionately affected poor, working class and immigrant areas much more drastically than it did others; as Patrick Zylberman stated, "the virus might well have behaved ‘democratically’, but the society it attacked was hardly egalitarian.” The cramped quarters, poor living conditions and lack of access to healthcare that typified many low-income areas in the early 20th century, and sadly still does today in many cases, provided ripe conditions for the spread of disease. After four years of global conflict, a shortage of food across Western Europe as well as in India also meant that many poorer people in particular were also undernourished and weaker as a result.

Switzerland was badly affected by the outbreak. Despite its neutrality, the Swiss army had been extensively mobilised to defend that neutrality. In July 1918, between 40-80% of Swiss troops on the Franco-German border had fallen victim to the flu. In response, training was cancelled and many of the soldiers were sent home, spreading the disease quickly across the country. Around half the population was infected, and some 25,000 people died. The fallout was considerable: the government and army were roundly criticised for their wholly inadequate response and lack of effective planning and support, and the level of public outcry purportedly brought the country close to civil war.

One of the most interesting cases is India. The Spanish Flu epidemic has until recently been almost entirely overlooked in Indian historiography, but the flu did have a major impact on the Indian independence movement. Although the flu killed 'only' 6% of the population - far less than some areas of Polynesia where over 20% of the population died - the death toll in the Indian subcontinent was a staggering 14 million in areas under direct British control, and another estimated 4 million in areas under satellite rule, making it numerically the worst hit country. It was also not lost that in much of Western Europe, the 'catastrophic' death toll rarely exceded 1% of the population. Despite this, David Arnold writes,

The impact of the disease was overshadowed by the prior encounter with bubonic plague, by military recruitment and the war, and by food shortages and price rises that pushed India to the brink of famine. Subsumed within a dominant narrative of political unrest and economic discontent, the epidemic found scant expression in official documentation, public debate and/or even private correspondence.

[Arnold, Death And The Modern Empire: The 1918–19 Influenza Epidemic In India, 2019]

Indeed, having faced widespread uproar over a heavy-handed and uncaring response to a bubonic plague outbreak in the early 1900s, and with the Indian Nationalist movement growing, British authorities tried to suppress the true scale of the outbreak, and tried a more sympathetic healthcare approach. However, the intervention was limited both in resources and by a deep-seated ideological viewpoint in the colonial authorities that India was somehow inherently 'unhygienic', and the government struggled to cope with the scale of the disaster. The flu struck against a backdrop of the failure of the typhoon season bringing widespread famine and drought, and as a result, the flu deaths were often conflated with those from the wider calamity, as indeed these increased the flu's morbidity. Combined with the fact that the flu had arrived on troop ships returning from the Western Front, the situation greatly contributed to growing sentiment that British authorities were perfectly happy to use Indian manpower but completely indifferent to the suffering of the Indian people.

The effects of this were two-fold. As the Raj government found itself increasingly unable to deal with the situation, help was increasingly provided by provincial and local organisations such as the Gujarat Sabha, many of which were already active as community reform organisations and had close ties to the Nationalist movement. [Spinney, Vital Statistics: How the Spanish flu of 1918 changed India, 2018]. In the Surat region of Gujarat, the organisation headed by freedom fighters Kalyanji and Kunvarji Mehta is estimated to have helped some 10,000 people across ethnic, caste or faith lines, for example, and also strengthened their connections both with the community and with other Nationalist groups and pro-independence figures in the region such as Dayalji Desai, a leading figure in the Non-Cooperation Movement [Chandra et al, India's Struggle for Independence, 1988]. This, in turn, helped to bolster much-needed grass-roots public support for Ghandi as a figurehead of the independence movement through their association with him.

As a result of the unrest caused by the famine, drought and flu, the Raj Government also passed the Rowlatt Bill in February 1919, extending martial law in India and ultimately culminating in the events of the Amritsar Massacre of 13th April 1919. In the wake of that atrocity, Indian Nationalists were keen to evoke the flu as further evidence of the uncaring attitude of colonial government, and an indictment of the callous nature of colonial rule. In the weeks after the massacre, the popular pro-independence journal Young India ran an editorial that argued that a government that was happy to allow the deaths of millions from flu “like rats without succour, would not mind if a few more died by the bullet".