In a social media feed yesterday, I came across a 1979 60 Minutes segment on the propaganda surrounding the 1976 swine flu scare. Many of us had already heard about how the event was reminiscent of today’s COVID-19 con, but actually watching the segment drives home how striking the parallels between the two disease scares are. Exaggerations of the bugs’ severity, media propaganda and fear-mongering, an effort to vaccinate the whole nation, serious vaccine-coincident side-effects, and an apparent government cover-up of the latter were all elements of the ’76 fiasco just as they epitomize what’s occurring today.
The segment opened with late 60 Minutes host Mike Wallace saying:
The flu season is upon us. Which type will we worry about this year, and what kind of shots will we be told to take? Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nation-wide outbreak, a pandemic.
Well, 46 million of us obediently took the shot, and now 4,000 Americans are claiming damages from Uncle Sam amounting to three and a half billion dollars because of what happened when they took that shot. By far the greatest number of the claims — two thirds of them — are for neurological damage, or even death, allegedly triggered by the flu shot.