Posted on 07/19/2022 12:36:07 PM PDT by Heartlander
It was a very bad year for the flu. The pathogen came in two large waves. This is only obvious in retrospect. At the time, not so much. Life went on as normal. There were gatherings. There were parties. There was travel. There were no masks. Doctors treated the sick. Traditional public health reigned as it had during the flu pandemic ten years earlier. No one considered lockdowns.
It’s a good thing because it was in the thick of this that many “super-spreader” events took place, among which was Woodstock itself. That event influenced all popular music after, and continues to do so today. No one was denied schooling or worship or separated from loved ones while they were dying. Weddings took place as normal. Indeed, hardly anyone remembers any of this.
This flu strain (H3N2) spread from Hong Kong to the United States according to the predictable timetable, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the US, mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide.
Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. (As for precisely how many died from Covid, we are not really in a position to know yet due to confusion between cases and inflection, forced mass testing, inaccurate testing, and widely admitted cause-of-death misclassification.)
So in terms of lethality, it was deadly and scary. “In 1968/69,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.” It was not as grim as 1957-58 but it still carried a 0.5% case fatality rate.
And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 54 years of age.
You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worst period of death – occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.
Stock markets didn’t crash because of the flu. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. The only school closures were due to absenteeism.
No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we just experienced. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses attributable to flu.
Media covered the pandemic but it never became a big issue.
The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that epidemics require medical not political responses.
It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.
Which raises the question: why was this time different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades. Was the difference that we have mass media invading our lives with endless notifications blowing up in our pockets? Was there some change in philosophy such that we now think politics is responsible for all existing aspects of life?
Was there a political element here in that the media blew this wildly out of proportion as revenge against Trump and his deplorables? Or did our excessive adoration of predictive modeling get out of control to the point that we let a physicist with ridiculous models frighten the world’s governments into violating the human rights of billions of people?
Maybe all of these were factors. Or maybe there is something darker and nefarious at work, as the conspiracy theorists would have it. Regardless, they all have some explaining to do.
By way of personal recollection, my own mother and father were part of a generation that believed they had developed sophisticated views of viruses. They understood that less vulnerable people getting them not only strengthened immune systems but contributed to disease mitigation by reaching “herd immunity.” They had a whole protocol to make a child feel better about being sick. I got a “sick toy,” unlimited ice cream, Vicks rub on my chest, a humidifier in my room, and so on.
They would constantly congratulate me on building immunity. They did their very best to be happy about my viruses, while doing their best to get me through them.
What happened between then and now? Was there some kind of lost knowledge, as happened with scurvy, when we once had sophistication and then the knowledge was lost and had to be re-found? For COVID-19, we reverted to medieval-style understandings and policies, even in the 21st century, and at the urging of the media and myopic advice from governments. It’s all very strange. And it cries out for answers.
Techno-feudalism is coming. We will all be serfs, owning nothing and being happy.
From what I recall, the Hong Kong flu had people far sicker than Covid did.
We survived.
I ended up in hospital with the Hong Kong flu. Was really sick but I survived
My then 33 year old mother had Hong Kong flu. She later told me she was so sick she thought she was going to die. Of course she survived and is still around.
“What happened between then and now?”
Back then the wealthy 1% elites weren’t able to jerk us around with phony narratives like they are today. Since then the concentration of wealth has gotten much higher and special interests now have enough money to corrupt ALL of our institutions, which they have done.
Graduated High School in Miami FL 1969. Didn’t miss a day of school (except to skip out and go to the beach.)
1969, 110 fever, emergency room trips, almost died. Haven’t been sick since!!!
I had pneumonia that year when I was 6. I had pneumonia the year before too. I remember getting on all 4s, and my mom bounding on my back to help me breath.
I was twelve years old when the Hong Kong flu hit my town. That was by far the sickest I have ever been. I have had covid twice now and it barely slowed me down. Covid, at least for me, was nothing compared to that flu.
What was different with Covid compared to the Hong Kong Flu? In 2020, there was an economy to destroy and an election to win for the commies.
I was 14 in 1969. There was a vaccine for the Hong Kong Flu but my father, a family physician, did not vaccinate my sister or me. I’m sure I had the HK Flu as I recall being extremely sick about that time. Had similar intense flu infections both before and after I was 14 too.
In my twenties I got a mild flu twice a year until I was about 27. That would have been 1982 and I haven’t had the flu since.
Long term immunity from repeated childhood exposure?
I also had that flu. I was a senior in high school and attended a Saturday evening event at the school. Later into the evening I felt like I was hit with a 2 x 4. I remained sick in my bed through the following Friday. There were sky high temperatures, sweats, vomiting and even hallucinations. Finally after 5 plus days it broke. I don’t recall if anyone else in my family got this. Like others here I really haven’t been sick since.
I was a senior in HS. Don’t even remember it.
I had that flu back in December of 1968.I lost 15 lbs and felt like crap for a week or so.
I got better.
I’ve been wondering the same thing
I had Hong Kong Flu in 1968 age 19 ...
It was a SARS like the Wu Hu Flu ...
I think that helped me when I had the WHF in the spring of 2020
I remember all the hype about the Hong Kong flu but I don’t know anyone that got it or died from it.
Maybe it didn’t spread to our part of the country so much.
Last flu I got was about 2017. Feb or March. Was very sick (fever, weak/shaky, light headed) for about 3-4 days but got over it fine.
On this day in 1969, I wasn’t around but I bet the HK flu didn’t make page one.
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