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Remember the Swine Flu Panic of 2009? No, You Don’t
Rush Limbaugh.com ^ | March 12, 2020 | Rush Limbaugh.com

Posted on 03/12/2020 1:25:48 PM PDT by Kaslin

RUSH: I’m always interested in people’s reaction to this program. I think I have a lot of empathy, and I think one of the reasons why the relationship you and I have is good is ’cause I know how you hear this show. That, I think, is a key ingredient. It’s called empathy. I know how you hear it.

So when I check emails and get questions from people, usually I’m not surprised, and I’m not surprised that I got beaucoup number of questions: “Rush, you don’t sound panicked over any of this. The last two days, you don’t sound panicked, and yet everybody’s panicked. I’m panicked,” people say in their email. “I’m scared to death. I mean, I’ve looked, the stock market was pulling up to 30,000. Now it’s down to 21,000. The Democrat Party, every move they’re making is designed to grow government, make government bigger, and you don’t seem alarmed.”

Folks, panic is… I don’t know. I’m not panicked. I am ticked off like you cannot believe, and I am really having a conversation with myself about how far to go in explaining why I’m mad, ’cause I’m mad about the politics of this. For example, let me give you some statistics. How many of you even remember the swine flu 2009, 2010? I don’t remember it. I mean, I remember we had it. But I don’t remember any panic about it. I don’t remember a thing about the swine flu.

I went back and looked at the stats and I was stunned. Are you ready for this? The swine flu outbreak in this country in 2009 and 2010, 60 million Americans were infected. Do you remember that? Sixty million were infected. Dr. Siegel, one of the Fox doctors was on TV explaining this last night. He was not my primary source for it, but he ended up confirming it. Sixty million people were infected.

Do you know how many people were hospitalized in 2009-2010 with the swine flu? Three hundred thousand were hospitalized. So 60 million people infected, 300,000 hospitalized. And nobody even remembers it. And why? Well, because we had a different president. We had a Democrat president by the name of Barack Obama, and the news then was how wonderfully well Obama was handling it, how expertly well Obama was dealing with it.

There wasn’t any media panic. The Republican Party did not politicize it at all. They made not one single effort that anybody can find or remember to try to make political hay out of it. It was treated as a health issue from top to bottom. Sixty million Americans infected, 300,000 hospitalized. I don’t know what the death toll was. The numbers with the coronavirus are not even close. They are barely a fraction of a percentage compared to the swine flu.

And then we also had Ebola. And I do remember a little bit more about Ebola, and once again, the Drive-By Media was praising the skills and the composure and the brilliance of Barack Obama in dealing with it. And I remember being kind of ticked off about that because there wasn’t anything anybody can do about Ebola. Ebola is like any of these other viruses. There’s nothing we can do to contain them.

See, the reason I’m not panicked is I don’t have enough emotion left for panic ’cause I’m too mad. I’m too ticked off at this. We’re watching the U.S. economy be wrecked here. There’s some people enjoying it. And it makes me mad. There’s some people’s lives here that are being seriously damaged over this. And you know what’s gonna happen? It’s gonna end. We are going to overcome it. It’s going to fizzle out like all of these do.

How did we ever survive 60 million infected with the swine flu? But we did to the point that hardly anybody remembers it. And that’s just 10 years ago, 300,000 hospitalized. So we overcame it. We overcame Ebola. This is gonna end, it’s gonna pass. And I’ll tell you what else is gonna happen. Because of the actions President Trump has taken, like this travel ban from Europe, that has really put the Democrats in a dicey position.

There’s some real positives if you want to find ’em here, and I, of course, have, and I’ll share them with you in a minute. The point is we’re gonna rebound from this, and when we do, you had better get ready and hold on tight, because this market’s gonna rebound. The people who are selling right now and getting out of it are panicking, and they don’t want to be selling. Everybody’s doing this from a very defensive posture and point of view.

And it’s adding… Like we get news that Tom Hanks and his wife have coronavirus. “Oh, no, it’s all going (mewling)! It’s over. Oh, my…” And then his kid — his kid, Chet — goes on TV, tries to calm everybody. “They’re fine. They’re in Australia. They’re fine. They’re not suffering at all. Everything’s fine!” It doesn’t matter. They’ve got it.

Anyway, this is gonna end, and this market is gonna rebound like you can’t believe because the people who have been selling off want to get back in it. And we are taking economic procedures right now that are going to serve to further reignite the economy when all this passes. And when we get back into the growth trajectory, some of the proposals the president’s making regarding payroll taxes, Small Business Administration loans, even a tax holiday?

You just wait until people have no more emotion left to be panicked and get tired of this and want to go a different direction. And that day is gonna happen. The day’s gonna come where people are gonna wake and say, “I’m tired of living this way. I’m fed up with being panicked every day. I’m fed up,” and then — because of the actions the president’s taken — we’re not gonna have that many brand-new infections.

By shutting off this travel from Europe… As I said, this has really put the Democrats in a bad position ’cause they love the European Union. They love it, and the very fact that travel from their beloved European Union has been shut down… But let… If they come out and oppose this, then they’re essentially coming out for open borders. This is actually… If you want to look at it politically, it’s a good move from that standpoint.

But I’m not panicking ’cause I’m too mad about this.

This is… I don’t know. (sigh) It’s… I know some of you are saying, “Rush, easy for you to say.” It isn’t easy for me to say, folks. Nobody’s immune from what’s happening here. I mean, you go back and you look at these swine flu numbers and you ask, “What was different? (chuckles) What was different was we had a Democrat in the White House and so the media didn’t want to be critical of the government.

The media wanted to be promoting him. They wanted to be positive. They wanted to promote the brilliance of Barack Obama, the brilliant management skills, the temperament, the crease in his slacks, the intelligence and all that. Now we’ve got just exact opposite.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Meanwhile, don’t forget, ’cause I’m sure everybody has, swine flu outbreak 2009, 2010, right here, United States of America, 60 million Americans infected. Do you remember any talk about running out of hospital beds? Were we gonna run out of IV saline solution? Were we gonna run out of masks? Sixty million Americans infected with the swine flu. Think pigs running everywhere if you have to, however you have to visualize this, 300,000 hospitalized.

We’re nowhere near 300,000 hospitalized with coronavirus. I mean, we’re not even close to it. In fact, worldwide we don’t even have 300,000 cases, worldwide, of the coronavirus. Three hundred thousand hospitalized in the United States alone. You don’t even remember it. You know why? Because Barack Obama was president, and he was God, and we couldn’t be critical. We had to build him up and promote him like nothing else we’ve ever seen before.

The media wasn’t critical at all. The media was praising the efforts of the government to deal with swine flu. The one difference is the freaking media. And you don’t even remember something 10 times as worse as what is happening now. There weren’t any travel bans.

Hell, you know what? You could still get barbecue wherever you wanted it. Kansas City, Missouri, didn’t shut down because of the swine flu. It’s a big barbecue town. All because the media and the Democrats were interested in making Obama look good and of course the Republicans back then didn’t politicize it. It was a health issue.

So if you’ve got kids, if you’ve got people panicked and worried, “Oh, my God. What do I do?” just give ’em the numbers. Swine flu 2009, 2010: 60 million Americans infected, 300,000 hospitalized. And you don’t even remember it. And I guarantee you nine out of 10 people you tell this to, “I don’t remember that.” Exactly. Ask ’em why they don’t remember it. “Well, I don’t know.” Yeah, you don’t remember it for one reason. Nobody made any big news about it. “Well, why not?” Well, answer that yourself. Say, “Who was president then?”

“Uh, I don’t know, Millard Fillmore?” No, Barack Obama.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Try this. February 12th, 2010, archives, Reuters news: “Swine Flu Has Killed Up to 17,000 in U.S.” February 12th, 2010: “H1N1 Swine Flu Has Killed as Much as 17,000 Americans Including 1,800 Children – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday the swine flu pandemic put as many people in the hospital as during the normal influenza season, but most were younger adults and children instead of the elderly.”


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: barackhussein0bama; communityspread; coronavirus; disease; flu; h1n1; media; mediabias; obama; rush; rushtranscript; swineflu; talkradio; transcript; trump; unfreepress; usatestingfail; worstpresidentever
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To: Kaslin

I remember swine flu in 2009.
I got sick at work, massive headache, vomiting, fever, had to stay at work.
The reason any of us onsite got it in the first place, our one lovely coworker with the morals of a lab rat got it from one of her many boyfriends and left her body fluids everywhere in the guardshack.
When you work with an absolute disgusting pig and have to decontaminate the workplace when you come in, you are going to get sick.
I swear there wasn’t a single surface she hadn’t smeared something on.


21 posted on 03/12/2020 4:30:54 PM PDT by Darksheare (Those who support liberal "Republicans" summarily support every action by same.)
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To: Kaslin

“Remember the Swine Flu Panic of 2009? No, You Don’t”

Sure I remember it. It took me and my wife a month to recover from it.


22 posted on 03/12/2020 4:33:30 PM PDT by antidemoncrat
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To: Kaslin

I remember being disabled for five years by a swine/bird flu and have a more enduring anger from that, than I would have had from warnings or from less so-called free trade.


23 posted on 03/12/2020 4:38:56 PM PDT by familyop ("Welcome to Costco. I love you." - -Costco greeter in the movie, "Idiocracy")
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To: antidemoncrat

I don’t remember the one from 2009, but I do remember the one from 1976.


24 posted on 03/12/2020 4:40:10 PM PDT by Kaslin
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To: LouieFisk

Yeah, I remember that one too


25 posted on 03/12/2020 4:42:26 PM PDT by Kaslin
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To: conservative98
Excellent segment by Rush and good information at his links. This story needs to be widely retold; the public needs to be shown what happened then while the prior administration was 'Bidening' its time. Ideally by Pence, who now occupies Biden's old seat, although what needs saying isn't his style. Biden's administration didn't declare an emergency until four months AFTER it was declared a pandemic. Trump/Pence administration acted well before then. Biden's administration didn't act until about 12k Americans had died. Trump addressed us while famously we still had zero deaths. There must be plenty of people, with pictures and videos, who still mourn those 12k, mostly young, swine flu dead from merely 10 years ago. Find some who are willing, collect their stories and get them out there! Trump asked the Democrats to come together in this fight. If they don't shove their own history back down their throat.

Rush's links say things got so bad the CDC and WHO stopped even trying to maintain a precise count of cases and deaths. They point out there weren't enough tests to go around back then either. Why did Biden administration not get that fixed over seven more years in office? Instead Biden/Obama administration left Trump with regulations which still crippled the Trump testing roll out. Once Trump realized the Biden administration's central control of testing was a problem he ended that. The Biden administration's flu pandemic was much worse in the Americas than elsewhere in the world. Under Trump, at the time of pandemic declaration, they are doing better than elsewhere in the world. This pandemic is killing off people in Biden's generation, sad. Biden's pandemic was killing off people in his grandchildren's generation.

26 posted on 03/12/2020 5:35:07 PM PDT by JohnBovenmyer (waiting for the tweets to hatch)
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To: dfwgator

Has there ever been an FR post that garnered 8000+ responses?


27 posted on 03/12/2020 5:55:39 PM PDT by 1FreeAmerican
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To: 1FreeAmerican

We tend to break up our threads now, like the corona virus threads we are now on #15 the Trump family train thread a new one is started every couple of weeks SO YES there are threads at the level of 8000 and more!!!


28 posted on 03/12/2020 6:05:10 PM PDT by Trump Girl Kit Cat (Yosemite Sam raising hell)
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To: ocrp1982

I think the reason there is more hysteria now than with the 2009 swine flu is that the Wu Flu has caused the most deaths in the blue states.

The liberal boomers and older in the blue states basically control the nation. They control the media, Hollywood, sports, and it is their peers that are dropping from it. Thus they gin up hysteria.

Not so much hysteria in 2009 when an infected Mexican toddler started the swine flu spread. The blue libtard coasts are much more important and so it is just much worse now.


29 posted on 03/12/2020 6:14:19 PM PDT by angry elephant (My MAGA cap is from a rally in Washingon state in May 2016)
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To: Kaslin

I’m sure it’s been said here many times but I believe the media and liberal institutions are hysterifying this to destroy our economy and thus destroy PDJT.


30 posted on 03/12/2020 6:31:43 PM PDT by GoldwaterCountry
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To: All

H1N1/swine flu death rate: 0.025%
COVID-19 death rate at the present time about 0.8% (S. Korea) - 6% (Italy)...so to be on the low side let’s say a 1% death rate for COVID-19 long term...for the same number of cases as Swine Flu that equals 600,000 fatalities in the U.S..


31 posted on 03/12/2020 6:41:52 PM PDT by Drago
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To: conservative98

Yep - and we still have idiots at FR that are helping the Left carry it’s “we’re all gonna die and it’s all because Trump didn’t do......something ......”


32 posted on 03/13/2020 2:17:07 AM PDT by trebb (Don't howl about illegal leeches, or Trump in general, while not donating to FR - it's hypocritical.)
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To: Kaslin

I also remember the 1976 Swine Flu scare. I got the shot because the government said we needed to and got a mild case of Guillain–Barré syndrome from it. I haven’t had a flu shot since then.


33 posted on 03/13/2020 12:42:50 PM PDT by antidemoncrat
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To: Kaslin
Excellent! Thank you for posting this, Kaslin.

Related article:

In April 2009, H1N1 Became a Pandemic; 6 Months Later, After 1,000 U.S. Deaths, Obama Finally Declared it a Public Health Emergency

34 posted on 03/14/2020 12:39:36 PM PDT by nutmeg (Mega prayers for Rush Limbaugh)
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