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.

(Transcript hat tip: WanttoKnow.info.)

Eerily reminiscent of today, one vaccine-induced problem was Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which also has apparently been induced by the coronavirus genetic-therapy agents (GTAs, AKA "vaccines").  Wallace spoke to a woman thus afflicted; he also mentioned vaccine-coincident deaths.  The video is below and well worth watching.

Yet there also were a number of differences between then and now, with a notable one being the 60 Minutes report itself.  While Wallace was a liberal, the media were not so much in the Establishment tank that it wouldn't expose its day's "COVID" con.  Thus did Wallace talk about the "U.S. government's publicity machine"; reveal lies told by officials; and grill ex–CDC head Dr. David Sencer, who devised and pushed the swine flu program and who looked in his interview a bit like a kid who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

(This said, that the swine flu fraud occurred during the tenure of President Gerald Ford, a Republican, certainly must have made the story more appealing to the EneMedia.)

Could you imagine Dr. Mouth (Anthony Fauci — "fauci" means "mouth" in Italian) being likewise grilled by the mainstream media today?  Imagining it is a nice fantasy for anyone who'd like to see the narcissistic Dr. Mouth take one on the chin, but it's a fanciful fantasy.  Only the mainstream media have access to the man, and they're busy deifying our prevaricating pooh-bah of pandemic prescriptions, who just recently went unchallenged in an interview after saying, "I represent science."  (Narcissistic much?)

Another difference between 1976 and today is that because we weren't as far down the Big Brother rabbit hole and Americans were more faith- and freedom-oriented — and because we weren't facing a scary "novel" virus — lockdowns and other restrictions never materialized.  In fact, I was a child at the time and don't remember the disease being a factor in our lives at all.  Along with a car trip from Jacksonville to Key West, Florida with my mother, most memorable to me about that year is that it was the Bicentennial, and quarters bearing a colonial drummer image, and red, white and blue themes, were everywhere.

We could use the Spirit of '76 — the real '76 — today.  But speaking volumes about our time is that even the Spirit of 1976 now seems, relatively speaking, almost quaint and boldly and unapologetically American.

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Image: Screen shot from CBS 60 Minutes video via shareable YouTube.

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