The Wired writeup is one of the more misleading ones. You're right: what the paper finds is that Spanish Flu disproportionately killed the young cohorts... it j

The Wired writeup is one of the more misleading ones. You're right: what the paper finds is that Spanish Flu disproportionately killed the young cohorts... it just may have been within young cohorts disproportionately killing young people with subtle hidden frailties. The real importance of this work is that it supports the interpretation that Spanish Flu was so deadly because young people missed a cycle of flu which would have immunized them to it as effectively as it had immunized (the surviving) elderly people, as opposed to some sort of intrinsic-youth-targeting factor unique to Spanish Flu.